Word: asylums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...decline the offer of the front." With that terse statement, Juan Domingo Perón last week renounced the presidential candidacy offered him by the Justicialist Liberation Front, a coalition of his supporters. Minutes later he boarded a plane for Paraguay, the country that had given him political asylum following his ouster in a coup 17 years...
...Cuckoo's Nest after only a short time inside a state mental hospital. From Shakespeare to Marnt-Sade to Durrenmatt, writers have attempted to probe the implications of insanity and to articulate the paradoxes that best madness. McMurphy soon learns that, as one of the doctors puts it, "the asylum is 'society in miniature.'" From his first boisterous appearance, crashing in as a recent "committal" from the state prison farm, to when he lies stretched out under a sheet, a dead "Vegetable," McMurphy is determined to prove that he can function in this society as well as in any other...
...here taking away the narration and point of view from Chief Bromden, and focusing attention on the figure of McMurphy only serves to exaggerate the action in its more light-hearted moments. Obsessed by the idea of a "Combine" that feeds society's mistakes into the machines of the asylum, a "factory" for patching up misfits to meet the Combine's humiliating standards, the Bromden of the book depicts an entire world that remains authoritarian and hostile both inside the institution...
Physically, the Combine continues to regulate the present. Even when McMurphy taken his friends out on a fishing trip, the exhilarating freedom is more than most of them can cope with anymore, andthe "wires" of authority and their own weakness pull them back to the asylum. The fishing trip is not included in the play, nor does one here ever get a sense of the outside world. By confining the action to the hospital, however, the claustrophobic feeling engendered by the rules and restrictions of the Combine is lacking. Even the basic process symbolized by the story, of democracy...
PERHAPS, HOWEVER, HIS BREAK from the asylum is rendered impossible not because of the lack of realistic alternatives, offered by a limited stage adaptation, but because he has experienced all too well a condition Billy Bibbitt blurts out in a group therapy session. Big Nurse is goading Billy to tears, as she accuses him of being selfish, of not stopping to think about why he does the things he does. Her analyses are abundant and readily articulated, but Billy has already born his psyche to shreds in his efforts at self-explanation. "But don't you see," he cries, breaking...