In the "Cuckoo's Nest"

I’m in rehearsals for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” at the Ashtabula Arts Center. It’s a powerful play, a surprisingly good cast and I have one of the plum parts in the play…certainly the part I wanted, though with relatively few lines.

I’m playing Chief Bromden, the narrator throughout the original book, an American Indian in a mental institution who pretends he can’t hear or talk to avoid interaction with the other patients and staff. He spends his days as an automaton: mechanically sweeping the floors of the ward and clandestinely observing the interactions of the staff and patients. In the play, he periodically breaks his silence during blackouts onstage and gives a running commentary on life in the institution and the dark conspiracies hiding behind the doors of the hospital. Bromden is drawn unwillingly from his shell by the arrival of a charismatic shammer named McMurphy, who finagled his way into the asylum to avoid his sentence at the work farm.

McMurphy, the irresistible force, meets an immovable object in Nurse Ratched who is in charge of the ward. The collision is powerful, tragic and triumphant…for details, you’ll have to come see the play, which runs Jan. 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26 and 27.