`Cuckoo's Nest' playwright glad stage version still popular.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

Playwright Dale Wasserman has two reasons to be pleased that Cottage Theatre is staging ``One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,'' his adaptation of Ken Kesey's celebrated novel.

OPENING THIS WEEK

The most obvious is that this is Kesey territory. The other is that the director, Reva Kaufman, is the daughter of an old friend.

Wasserman and Norman Kaufman worked together in a guerrilla theater group that performed on the streets and sometimes on stages in Los Angeles in the 1930s.

``We were young and full of ideals and passion,'' Wasserman recalls of their days with Rebel Theater. ``We had a world to change. We were all very poor, but full of energy and hope. We didn't know it back then, but we were having a wonderful time. I'm pleased that Reva is the daughter of someone I remember very fondly.''

Kaufman's father, who now lives in Eugene, was the Los Angeles group's technical director.

``He could go into junk piles and throwaways and contrive wonderful things,'' Wasserman says. ``He was a wizard.''

Wasserman now lives in Arizona.

When Norman Kaufman located Wasserman, contacted him and told him his daughter was going to direct ``Cuckoo's Nest,'' the playwright sent her an autographed script and a few words of encouragement.

``He told my father that the play is very open to the director's imagination, that I should approach it imaginatively and not be afraid to experiment.''

Reva Kaufman says she's looked at older and recent versions of the script and made only small changes. That is probably just as well. In a telephone interview last week, Wasserman indicated that he's hoping to put a stop to radically different stagings of the play.

``Other people tinker with it. I don't,'' he said. ``People come to me and ask about this and that. I'm used to listening to theater people, and sometimes I allow changes. But I'm putting a stop to that now.''

Wasserman says he was particularly displeased with a recent Steppenwolf Theater production in Chicago that added a folk music score, complicated on-stage projections and other elements that ``added nothing.''

He's particularly pleased that a straightforward London staging, with Christian Slater in the lead role, is a big hit right now in London.

Beyond that, he finds it satisfying that ``a new generation seems just as responsive'' to ``Cuckoo's Nest'' as earlier generations were.

Noting that the median age of the London audience is around 30, he added that, ``The play has a remarkable life. It's not going away. Many of the current productions are foreign,'' he says, ``but the numbers don't diminish.''

He thinks the play is surviving and thriving because it has several levels, including melodrama and metaphor.

Actor Kirk Douglas hired Wasserman to turn Kesey's novel about a con man in a mental ward run by a sadistic nurse into both a play and a movie. Wasserman met with Kesey just once, in Hollywood, to talk about technical challenges of doing that.

But the conversation quickly switched tracks when Kesey found out Wasserman had been a hobo for years and had spent time in lumber camps and small-town jails. ``We had really good stuff to talk about,'' Wasserman says, ``and we never got around to discussing the literary problems.''

Wasserman says Kesey was happy with the play (starring Kirk Douglas on Broadway in 1963), but not with the subsequent movie version starring Jack Nicholson.

The play stuck to the theme and revealed the mind of a schizophrenic, he says.

``The movie was a good nut house movie but didn't explore the metaphor of a combine that is oppressive and punishes and destroys the individual."

Wasserman said a critic once pointed out to him that ``Cuckoo's Nest'' is ``fundamentally the same play'' as the other work for which he's known, ``Man of La Mancha,'' a musical about Miguel de Cervantes, author of ``Don Quixote.''

``In terms of argument they are indeed the same play, with the same underlying thesis,'' Wasserman says. `` `Man of La Mancha' is a naked plea for idealism, and `Cuckoo's Nest' in a way is also a plea for individualism. They have a great deal in common.''

Another thing they have in common is popularity. ``Man of La Mancha,'' Wasserman says, competes with ``Cuckoo's Nest'' for the number of productions.

Wasserman's current projects include the satirical ``Beggar's Holiday,'' an American version of the original 1728 ``The Beggar's Opera'' by John Gay; and two one-acts, ``Boy on Blacktop Road'' and ``The Stallion's Howl,'' intended to be staged together as ``Open Secrets.'' Both are mysteries.

The ``Open Secrets'' script, he says, includes a quotation from Ken Kesey: ``The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. The need for mystery is greater than the need for answers.''

Kaufman's Cottage Theatre cast features Davis Smith as Randall McMurphy, Nancy West as Nurse Ratched and Shevach Lambert as Chief Bromden. The cast also includes Don Kelley, Chris Carwithen, Rory Rousseve, Lee Kambarian, Bob Glasser, Emily Nordin-Tuininga, Tony Willey, Frank Long, Jim Curtiss, Bob Maphies, Nikki Pagniano, Marian Dempsey and Gil Rodello.

PLAY PREVIEW

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2:30 p.m. Sundays, opening Friday and running through Feb. 5

Where: Cottage Theatre, 700 Village Drive, Cottage Grove 

How much: $13 at www.cottagetheatre.org or 942-8001

CAPTION(S):

Davis Smith (right) plays McMurphy, who taunts the staff of his psychiatric ward in Cottage Theatre's production of ``One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'' Wayne Eastburn / The Register-Guard