Review: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by La Bête Productions
by Donna Provencher

 

There is a version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that is very easy to stage badly.

 

Some productions are loud and lurid and uncomplicated, with McMurphy as the swaggering folk hero, Nurse Ratched as the emasculating monster, the men of the ward sane people imprisoned by a cruel system, as everything barrels inevitably toward tragedy we can see coming from 500 paces.

 

Blake Hamman’s production for La Bête Productions is intentionally smarter than that.

 

Hamman directs Dale Wasserman’s adaptation with a cogent and thoughtful restraint, trusting the material rather than embellishing it. He does not shy away from its brutality or sexuality, but neither does he sensationalize them. The result is a production of remarkable precision that also allows some of the most uncomfortable questions about its source material to remain uncomfortable.

 

At the center of it is Kevin Engel’s R.P. McMurphy, in a performance that puts Engel squarely on my own list of San Antonio actors to watch. Engel does not so much dominate the production as provide a total gravitational center around which everything else orbits. The ensemble around him is strong, but McMurphy is the disruptive force through which we watch the evolution (and devolution) of the rest the ward, and Engel has the charisma necessary to make that machinery work.

 

Crucially, neither Engel nor Hamman attempts to clean McMurphy up for a contemporary audience. He’s magnetic and funny and genuinely liberating to the men around him; he’s also reckless, manipulative and, at times, a predatory creep. Allowing all of those things to coexist makes him vastly more interesting than turning him into an uncomplicated martyr to individual freedom and patient rights.

 

 

Opposite him, Belinda Harolds gives us a beautifully restrained and nuanced Nurse Ratched. Cuckoo’s Nest, following its debut,  became enormously influential in the cultural backlash against institutional psychiatry, the eventual closure of mental institutions instead of meaningful reform, and the rise in America’s unhoused population. And so, 60+ years after the novel’s publication, it is tempting to reduce its psychiatric ward to “totally sane men imprisoned by a perfectly evil woman.” But this production resists that simplification.

 

Hamman’s patients are mistreated, controlled and stripped of agency, but they are also people experiencing genuine psychiatric illness and distress. Likewise, Harolds does not begin with Ratched twirling a metaphorical Snidely Whiplash mustache. Her Ratched seems to genuinely believe in the system she administers and, perhaps more disturbingly, in her own ability to decide what is best for the people under her care. This Ratched’s cruelty emerges directly from her own well-meaning hubris, and Harolds and Hamman walk that line admirably. It makes the eventual collision between Ratched and McMurphy considerably more complicated than hero versus villain.

 

Ernesto Jacinto Jr., a newcomer to the local stage, gives a lovely turn as Dale Harding, the closeted gay patient who serves as something like the ward’s intellectual lifeblood and was facto leader before McMurphy’s arrival. Jacinto nails both Harding’s intelligence and his fragility. He is particularly affecting in the closing scenes, when Harding, and we, the audience, learn what has ultimately become of McMurphy. Jacinto’s star is rising with an assured and promising early career.

 

The rest of the ward is similarly well populated. Neil Lewis as Cheswick, Josh Molnar as Scanlon and Amadeo Rivas as Martini create distinct and distinctive human beings rather than a generic smorgasbord of “crazy” patients, while Sam K. Haynie’s Ruckley is quietly heartbreaking. Anyone who has spent meaningful time around people in severe psychiatric illness will recognize something painfully astute in Haynie’s physical and behavioral specificity. It would have been very easy to make Ruckley a caricature, and Molnar never does.

 

 

Samwell Racer gives us a slightly heavier-handed Billy Bibbitt than the character is sometimes played. But Hamman’s choice to make Billy visibly sicker ultimately pays off because it gives his arc a direction. Billy's encounter with Candy Starr produces one of the evening’s most effective pieces of physical storytelling: suddenly Billy stands straighter with Ratched, fights to remain with Candy and, for a moment, speaks without the stutter that has for so long defined him. We glimpse the man he might have become without an abusive and controlling parent.

 

And then Ratched takes it all away, making the sequence after Billy’s demise one of the production’s strongest.

 

 

Em Kuplack, meanwhile, steals just about every scene she enters as Candy Starr. In relatively little stage time, Kuplack manages to avoid the tattered “sex worker with a heart of gold” stereotype and instead creates a Candy who is funny, warm, genuine and enormously likable. Her affection for these men feels human rather than, like so many Starrs before her,a plot device. Kuplack is another performer I would very much like to see more of.

 

Eric Lozano’s Chief Bromden presents one unavoidable visual challenge: the character is famously defined in part by his enormous physical stature. Lozano is a talented actor but not an unusually large man. Hamman stages around the discrepancy cleverly enough that it quickly becomes less distracting than one might expect, and Lozano’s committed and moving performance does the rest.

 

Particularly effective are the production’s visual and aural treatments of Bromden’s “machinery” hallucinations, where Jorge Rebolledo’s lighting and Stow Neilson’s sound help externalize the Chief’s psychosis without turning it into spectacle for spectacle’s sake.

 

That precision extends to the physical production. Peter J. Photos’ gorgeous hospital set is almost suspiciously attractive for a 1960s psychiatric ward; I found myself longing for a little more ugliness and institutional linoleum. But that’s a minor aesthetic quibble with an otherwise immaculate and impressively detailed set. Even ancillary rooms remain visible through corridors and doorways, giving the ward the sense that it continues beyond the immediate playing space. The design establishes time and place and institutional geography without having to explain theme.

 

Across the board, the cast feels unusually locked in and attuned with one another. From the aides to Priscilla Sandate’s wonderfully diminutive Nurse Flinn, there is little sense of anyone onstage ever just occupying space while waiting for a line. Lighting and sound cues hit with precision, transitions all have purpose, and Hamman maintains creative control over a story that could very easily skew melodramatic.

 

That creative control may very well be the most exciting thing about this Cuckoo’s Nest, because it also says something about La Bête Productions itself. The company has recently secured a permanent home at Woodlawn Pointe, and while celebrating its permanent home, the company appears to be setting a significantly higher bar for San Antonio production standards going forward.

 

From its inaugural production of The Normal Heart last year, La Bête is punching considerably above the weight class one might expect from a relatively young company. Not through flash or sheer expense , but through attention to detail, attracting strong artists and determining that every element onstage should serve the production.

 

That’s good news for San Antonio theater, even if it may make some neighboring companies sweat a little. When one small nonprofit organization raises the bar, everybody else — particular local professional theaters — eventually has to decide whether they’re capable of clearing it.

 

And, with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, La Bête has set the bar considerably high.

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey, adapted by Dale Wasserman
La Bête Productions

July 30 - August 16, 206

Added performance: August 15, 2 p.m.
Woodlawn Pointe, 702 Donaldson Ave, San Antonio, TX 78201 

TICKETS ON SALE HERE