First, Quixote.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

Fasten your seat belts, ladies and gentlemen: A convoluted story lies behind the fact that Very Little Theatre, a community theater not widely known outside the Eugene area, will soon produce a new play by a nationally known playwright.

Dale Wasserman's new "Players in the Game" will open at Very Little Theatre on April 20, following its production of his classic musical "Man of La Mancha," which opens Friday night.

Wasserman, who is 90, more or less - remember, this is a complicated story - is also the guy who wrote the stage version of Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

But our tale really begins 70 years ago on the streets of Los Angeles, where Wasserman, a self-educated school dropout, and a stage techie named Norman Kaufman were producing what these days we would call guerrilla theater.

Wasserman explains it this way in an e-mail interview from his home in Arizona:

"Norman Kaufman and I, while very young and often hungry, were members of a street-theater troupe playing the streets of downtown Los Angeles and occasionally, when we could raise rental money, stages of various theaters. I would direct, and Norman would build and/or improvise our settings and technical gadgets, some of which would inconveniently blow up during performance. Norman's ingenuity was endless, if erratic. My work was more ambitious than excellent."

Kaufman was a graduate student at UCLA in those days. He recalls meeting Wasserman this way: "I met him because a neighborhood girl I knew suggested I come down to this organization called the Rebel Players. Dale was an actor. Not a particularly good one, as I recall."

Flash forward to the present. Kaufman, now 91, lives in Eugene. His daughter, Reva Kaufman, is a local theater director, though she was born just after her father gave up theater for a career in the oil business.

Reva Kaufman happened to direct Wasserman's stage adaptation of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" at Cottage Theatre in 2005.

She got talking with her dad one day during that show and learned that he and Wasserman were once buddies.

She wondered: Is Wasserman even still alive? Her father sent Wasserman a letter through his literary agent.

Next thing she knew, she and Wasserman and her dad were corresponding by e-mail.

``He is either 89, 90 or 91,'' Reva Kaufman says of the playwright, who has no birth certificate but says he was born in about 1917. ``But the man still has got a phenomenal wit.''

Wasserman wrote his stage version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" after holing up with Kesey for a few days in the early 1960s at the Chateau Marmont, a posh hotel on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard.

``In my long meeting with Kesey, I learned that he was himself a frustrated playwright and thought that he should be writing the play/movie,'' Wasserman said. ``I got along fine with him after he discovered that I wasn't a New York intellectual but a more authentic bum than he was himself, and we learned that we had some lumber camps and some small-town jails in common.''

He never saw Kesey again after that visit, though they spoke on the telephone.

"To work more closely with Kesey would be to invite competition, not cooperation, so I didn't," said Wasserman, who - like Kesey - was a wrestler. "Kesey loved the play and hated the movie. He objected chiefly to Jack Nicholson's (movie) portrayal. He called him, `that grinning dwarf.'

``Kesey came frequently to performances of `The Cuckoo's Nest' at the Little Fox Theatre in San Francisco during its six-year run, bringing some of his Merry Pranksters with him and filling the house with an exhilarating fog of weed-smoke, lending the audience lots of altitude.''

But ``Man of La Mancha'' is the play for which Wasserman is chiefly known. Based loosely on Miguel de Cervantes' 17th century novel ``Don Quixote,'' its first incarnation was ``I, Don Quixote,'' a teleplay on CBS.

The 1965 Broadway musical version, for which Wasserman wrote the book, starred Richard Kiley. It won numerous Tony awards and ran for 2,328 performances.

A subsequent movie version with Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren was less successful.

Despite their vastly different settings, the stories of Quixote and the brawling Randall McMurphy in "Cuckoo's Nest" are more similar than different.

Wasserman said he first heard about this from a critic, but agrees.

"Both feature rebels as their protagonists," Wasserman acknowledges. ``Both rebels fight society, and are defeated, but both leave behind one convert who will carry the philosophy onward. I think that this is true, and I note that all of my plays express this motif: Fight, and it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, as long as you follow the quest!''

Wasserman says it would have been as much fun to spend a few days working with Cervantes on "La Mancha" as it was working with the Oregonian Kesey.

"We were both hoboes leading raffish lives," he said, "loving the theater, which didn't love us back, failing frequently but persisting. In Cervantes' case he wrote some 40 plays, none successful."

Oddly, Wasserman says he has never read "Don Quixote." "La Mancha," he said, is based on Cervantes' "Entremeses" (``Interludes''), a series of sketches of life in prison and the Spanish underworld.

After corresponding with Reva Kaufman, Wasserman asked whether she might be interested in looking at his new play, "Players in the Game," which is set in 14th century Europe.

The story deals with the abuse of power in the church and has been produced only once before, at a college in the Midwest two years ago.

Wasserman said theaters are afraid of it.

"It is my strongest and, I think, my best written play," he said. "Reva responded to certain virtues in it: a delicious piece for actors and directors to chew on; an audacity of idea which takes some guts to confront. Anybody can play it safe in theater, and thereby contribute nothing but a bit of entertainment. Reva has the guts to attempt something more, so more power to her."

The show will run at Very Little Theatre April 20 through May 6.

PLAY PREVIEW

Man of La Mancha

What: The Broadway musical about Don Quixote

Where: Very Little Theatre, 2350 Hilyard St.

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and March 29-31, April 5-7 and 12-14; also 2 p.m. Sunday and April 1

Tickets: $17, $13 on Thursdays (344-7751)