Still flying URI takes on Cuckoo’s Nest BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

In instant replay, the mental hospital scene kept repeating. But since this was a rehearsal, each time there were little variations, like when you go over an unpleasant encounter in your mind and keep improving on what you should have said.

Randle Patrick McMurphy, played by URI senior Sean McConaghy, has inspired the six other men on the ward to pretend that they are still watching the baseball game on the TV that Nurse Ratched — Jaclyn Marfuggi — has just unplugged. They hoot and holler and imagine a home run that drives them wild.

Skirting the action in Studio J, arms crossed below an expression of concentration, is Alan Hawkridge. Each time the actors stop and look over to the director, he gives them some positive feedback, and the actors tinker with the details a bit as they run through the scene once more. After 20 minutes or so, the actress playing the rules-stickler of a head nurse has a great idea: she steps out of the glass-protected observation room and stands in front of the blank-screen set as she rails at them to settle down. With this addition, one of the most formidable female villains of modern American literature has unwittingly joined in on the fantasy of these inmates, and the particular confrontation in this play has become much more interesting.

URI Theatre is presenting Dale Wasserman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which received the 2001 Tony Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Revival. The 1962 novel was a cult favorite, and the 1975 movie version starring Jack Nicholson won an Oscar for Best Picture. Evidently, in the American pop psyche at least, a chord was struck that resounded for more than a decade.

McMurphy represents the scamp spirit of the age, the social outsider confident enough to not care if he is an outcast. In the tradition of Bre’r Rabbit, the prankster chooses an insane asylum rather than hard work on a prison farm. Once in the hospital, he infects the inmates with his rowdy brand of individuality and resistance to authority, even though he risks shock therapy and a potential lobotomy.

Archetypal hippie Kesey, in the Beatnik tradition of scorning society, set out on a road trip in a psychedelic-painted bus with friends. They styled themselves the Merry Pranksters and were immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a 1967 best seller.

That was then, this is now. Is the story Kesey tells a period piece today, when the gray-flannel-suit conformity of the 1950s is a half-century away and individualism much less an issue?

"That’s true, but there’s still an incredible pressure to conform," says the director. "And I think we found that going into the war with Iraq. We started to feel outside of society in that way, and outside the beliefs that were leading us into war. So I think there are still relevant things here to look at."

An instructor at the University of Rhode Island for four years, Hawkridge teaches both acting and directing as well as a course in script analysis. Providence theatergoers may remember him from his days as artistic director of NewGate Theatre, from 1991 to ’96.

Hawkridge says that more than 40 years later, his young actors there haven’t noticed a generation gap regarding the message of the book. "They seem to understand the play, and seem to understand how — I don’t want to draw allusions to URI — but how an institution can become something that’s run for the good of the institution rather than for the people at the institution. Being efficient and disciplined, you’re actually missing the individuality within the particular system."

The Wasserman adaptation was taken to task by some critics for being heavy-handed, melodramatic. In fact, when Gary Sinese and Chicago’s legendary Steppenwolf Theater wanted to stage Cuckoo’s Nest, they tried to get the rights to commission a fresh adaptation, but couldn’t. Hawkridge is kinder than some have been about Kesey’s portrait of the head nurse, which has been called misogynistic. The director found a way to finesse the portrayal that enhances the drama.

"I didn’t want Nurse Ratched to be this evil bitch that everybody hates," he says. "I wanted to humanize her. She feels she’s doing what’s right for these patients. I felt like I wanted to create sort of a balance there. She might be misguided, but she certainly feels like she’s doing the right thing."

All in all, Hawkridge thinks that the playfulness inherent in the story will serve his production well as a theatrical experience.

"I like the sweep of the play, the way it takes you on a journey," he asserts. "You see each of the patients start to grow and start coming out of themselves, even within their particular neurosis. Laughter, I think, is a powerful thing."

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, adapted by Dale Wasserman from the novel by Ken Kesey, runs February 19-28 at URI Theatre in the Fine Arts Center on the Kingston campus. For reservations, call (401) 874-5843.