Theater: Duel in a Snake Pit

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Dale Wasserman, hinges on a duel in a loony bin, and the play seems almost as disturbed and disturbing as its setting. Ward Nurse Ratched (Joan Tetzel) is a kind of female Fu Manchu with incredibly sweeping authority. If a patient steps out of line, she punishes him with electric shock treatments.

This steely female terror is challenged by Randle McMurphy (Kirk Douglas), a rugged, open-hearted rebel who bristles at rules. McMurphy is classified as a “psychopathic” brawler. He tries to put spunk into the patients and when his good-humored kindliness restores speech to a chronic mute, Nurse Ratched is remorseless.

Played with fire and ice by Kirk Douglas and Joan Tetzel, Cuckoo’s Nest is implausible, if scarifying, viewed as realism. Wasserman intends the insane asylum as a metaphor for the world. But instead of cracking sick jokes, he ought to have tried for outright theater-of-the-absurd. The play gains in tension what it loses in triteness by linking Nurse Ratched’s oppression of the patients to her sexual repression of herself.

While Playwright Wasserman’s motives are pro-human and antiauthoritarian, he crudely mistakes outrage for rage, license for liberty, and intellectual dandruff for ideas. It is rather a pity, for at moments he shows a gift for lighting up secret crannies of the human heart.