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Under other circumstances, it would be the gravest of insults to say an actor was upstaged by the scenery, but in Rose Riordan's new production of Kesey's classic novel, it could hardly be otherwise. Here the asylum is not merely the setting but the lead antagonist: a breathing, blinking being dedicated to extinguishing the humanity of its inhabitants, with Nurse Ratched as its agent. It's a hell of a set piece, designed by Tony Cisek and lit in a breathtaking realist style by Diane Ferry Williams, all green tile and fluorescent tubes and heavy steel doors, and it transcends verisimilitude. It glowers.
If this sounds a bit like the Overlook Hotel, it's intentional. Riordan's vision draws from a long history of plays and films about haunted places, from the House of Usher to the Event Horizon, and the production is rife with horror movie tropes: flickering lights at the end of a dark hallway, haze, thunder, constant thrumming and even, at one point, distorted children's voices. It would be cheesy if it weren't so frightening. As the stakes climb in the second half of the play and Ratched's own madness becomes apparent, I felt the claustrophobic panic of a Hitchcock thriller.
The play, adapted by Dale Wasserman, predates Miloš Forman's film by more than a decade, and retains the language of machinery (in Chief Bromden's paranoid internal monologue) and the emasculation of Kesey's novel. Riordan combines the two: Bromden's destruction of the nurse station's blinking electrical apparatus is not just an assertion of his power over the Combine; it is, in a neat conceptual turn, the neutering of the hospital.
The human performers in Riordan's production are, for the most part, very good: Tim Sampson is painfully broken as Chief Bromden (the role his father played in Forman's film); Gretchen Corbett makes an icy, baleful Nurse Ratched; and PJ Sosko, as Randle P. McMurphy, more or less reprises his performance as Hank Stamper in Sometimes a Great Notion, which is fine by me. The best of the bunch, though, was Ryan Tresser, appearing in Portland for the first time as Billy Bibbit, the fragile youth driven to desperation by Ratched's browbeating. He makes his character's psychosis far more real than those of his fellow inmates, and his fate is, accordingly, more upsetting than McMurphy's.
UPDATE 3/9/2010: PJ Sosko has left the show after badly injuring his knee. Ward Duffy will assume the role starting March 10.
SEE IT: Portland Center Stage at the Gerding Theater, 128 NW 11th Ave., 445-3700. 7:30 pm Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 pm Saturdays-Sundays. Closes March 27. $33-$58.
WWeek 2015