Theater: Shock Corridor ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ at the JBT

Theater: Shock Corridor

‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ at the JBT

By: David Williams

Omaha City Weekly Issue: September 23, 2009

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” Through Oct. 11 Thurs.-Sat. at 7:30 p.m. Sundays at 3 p.m. $25 Adults, $20 seniors and students, $15 Thursdays Tickets: 502-5767, johnbeasleytheater.org 30th and Q streets

it’s the most awkward moment in all of theater when an actor forgets a line or three. Sitting in the dark the other night during “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” at the John Beasley Theater, the collective reaction was inevitable. The audience froze right along with her.

I chalked it up to her 20-year hiatus from the stage. Rusty, that’s all, thought I.

But I had never been so wrong, never so taken in by the power of understatement, of playing it “small.” Kelli Nesmith hesitated for what seemed an eternity on her very first line of the evening. And when she finally spoke, her clipped speech, too-carefully-measured words, and lips that moved only slightly more than those of a second rate ventriloquist continued to freeze the audience.

“Rivet” would be a better word.

What better way to play Nurse Ratched, the sadistic angel of no mercy who rules with an iron fist the late ‘50s insane asylum of novelist Ken Kesey’s invention and playwright Dale Wasserman’s interpretation?

I have never in five years of scribbling notes been so fooled, so manipulated. And that’s what great theater is all about – manipulation by creative, talented artists. I went from “boy, this is going to be a long night” to hanging on her every, barely-whispered word.

Nesmith is great, but the night really belongs to Fred Siegers, the Kearney transplant in his first leading Omaha role. He plays McMurphy, the in-and-out-of-jail wanderer who finagles his way into the loony bin as a vacation of sorts from the work farm. Siegers is “big” to Nesmith’s “small” and the resulting conflict between the two steamrolls toward an edge-of-your-seat climax in this raw yet transcendent tragi-comedy.

McMurphy is the charismatic, almost messianic figure whose lust for life soon has his fellow patients finding their long-lost humanity, even as Nurse Ratched fits him for a crown of thorns all his own.

Dayton Rogers, the young man who hit one out of the park last season in his community theater debut with the company’s baseball-themed “Fences,” returns with another fine performance as Billy, the st-st-stuttering man-boy. Christopher Slater shines as Harding, the erudite brain of the bunch. A blank-faced Mark O’Leary beguiles as a man with a crucifixion complex.

And Carl Brooks delights as Chief, a (seemingly) catatonic mountain of a man.

“I been away a long time,” the silent one says after McMurphy has coaxed and cajoled him back from the ethers of a dream world that has him frequently speaking in asides to the audience as the cast moves eerily in slow motion among the shadows of the stark, antiseptic, beige- everywhere, thorazine-dulled set designed by director Tyrone Beasley.

Cult film classic “Shock Corridor,” where a reporter has himself committed to write an exposé on a then draconian mental health system, predates this work as a chilling immersion into the societal definition of sanity, but Chief probably says it best in his opening monologue. “There are so many things that are real, even if they never happened.”