NEW YORK — Time and "the times" aren't the same thing. We use the latter, blandly meaningless unit of measurement to generalize about an era present or past, the scent of something blowing in the wind.
Time has been only moderately kind to Ken Kesey's 1962 novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." It's primarily an emblem of its times.
Kesey pitted a roughneck saint, Randle P. McMurphy, against Nurse Ratched, a bitch-goddess in starched whites. His vision of America hit readers--especially of high school and college age--like a call to arms against everything soul-sucking about American conformity. It was a parable with legs, its prose and meanings easy to read.
Since the early '60s, Dale Wasserman's stage version of the novel got around, too, though less indelibly than the 1975 movie, starring Jack Nicholson's adorable leer. The play began on Broadway in a 1963 production starring Kirk Douglas. (His son, Michael, later hit the jackpot producing the film.) Wasserman's revised and condensed version opened off-Broadway in 1971, with William Devane as McMurphy.
Now we have the current, walloping Steppenwolf Theater Company's revival, starring Gary Sinise, already a large hit in both Chicago and London. Its limited Broadway run continues through June 17, just long enough to enjoy a likely Tony Award or three.
For some of us, Kesey's story--narrated (like the play) by Chief Bromden, McMurphy's stoic angel of mercy--doesn't contain great mysteries in its fist. It's more a blunt instrument. Its rabble-rousing spirit relates to earlier projects favored by the supremely talented Steppenwolf ensemble: John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" and "Of Mice and Men," or Lanford Wilson's "Balm in Gilead," with which Steppenwolf took New York by sheer theatrical force back in the '80s.
Even if you don't cherish the material, however, director Terry Kinney's staging is formidable.
At first glance, Sinise's McMurphy resembles Nicholson's, especially in the region of the eyebrows. But Sinise hews closer to Kesey's original concept. He looks like a logger, a brawler or a biker--like a guy who's kicked around the Northwest, in other words.
It's not a performance loaded with surprise; the wild-eyed Sinise has an intensity streak well-suited to McMurphy, but it can make his explosive big moments a little heavy, a little obvious. Maybe he's over-familiar from the movies, "Forrest Gump" among them. Yet Sinise is a solid anchor for this burly production. A few movies haven't dulled his stage technique. And he reveals the requisite tenderness in his scenes with Tim Sampson's moving Chief Bromden.
