One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest

Front left to right: Scott Neville, Jarret Hains, Max Davidson, Andy Pesz, Tony Sturman, Christian Milanovic. Rear, Randy Johnston.

Randle P. McMurphy is a troublemaker. He followed up his Distinguished Service Cross for leading an escape from a prison camp with a dishonourable discharge, followed by a history of drunkenness, assault and battery, disturbing the peace...

After his latest brush with the law, McMurphy is keen to avoid another stint hoeing peas for the state. So when the court decides he's a psychopath, he's happy to spend some time in the psychiatric hospital instead.

Left to right: Melissa Radford, Andy Pesz (kneeling), Susan Amos, Chris Barry, Darren Johnston, Jane Saunders.

There he finds a sorry lot of men, beaten down and defeated. One of the reasons for their defeat is Nurse Ratched, the head nurse, who despite her veneer of calm reasonableness runs the ward with an iron fist.

McMurphy quickly sizes up the situation and bets the other patients he can make Ratched lose her cool. He leads a revolt so they can watch the World Series on television, fleeces his ward-mates in card games, and smuggles in liquor and a couple of good-time girls for a midnight party.

In the process,McMurphy befriends Chief Bromden, a Native man who has not spoken for years, and does what the professionals have failed to do. But he pays a heavy price.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest opened at the Cort Theatre in New York in November 1963. Based on the novel by Ken Kesey, it later became a movie, starring Jack Nicholson as McMurphy.

Dale Wasserman

Dale Wasserman was born in Rhinelander, Wisconsin in 1914. Orphaned at the age of nine, he lived in a state orphanage before spending his adolescence riding the rails and sleeping rough in Los Angeles.

He started working in theatre at 19 as a self-taught lighting designer, director and producer. Believing he could write better plays than the ones he was directing, he became a writer, beginning with live television dramas in the 1950s and going on to screenplays, including The Vikings and Mr. Buddwing.

Besides One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he wrote the book for the musical Man of La Mancha as well as the screenplay for the film version. Man of La Mancha grew out of a 90-minute television drama that Wasserman wrote in 1959, called I, Don Quixote.

He also wrote the plays How I Saved the Whole Damn World and Boy on Blacktop Road. Wasserman died in 2008.

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