Word: bromden
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...CHIEF BROMDEN, THE NARRATOR OF THE BOOK, compared his fellow inmates to cartoon figures, to puppets "that you were supposed to laugh at," who might have been "real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys." Unfortunately on stage, the "real" fell rather flat. Effeminate Dale Harding (Roger Harkenrider) flips his hands a little too obviously: Billy Bibbitt (Lawrason Driscoll) undergoes a rather facile transformation from stuttering virgin to surly stud...
...swaggering and posturing, his gambling with cigarettes or human lives, is often too funny for comfort or credibility. A continuous lack of subtlety brought out the more humorous sides of the situation, and only towards the very end, in a scene like the one in which he gets Chief Bromden (Frank Savino) to talk, does the underlying seriousness become apparent. Faced with the prospect of remaining "committed" for life, he keeps up his laughter, if desperately, finally realizing that "you gotta laugh, especially when things sin't so funny...
Transposing character and subject matter from the pirated page to the theatre is always a touchy operation, and 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...
...again," says Chief Bromden, as he steps through the hospital window, escaping to the outside world, and leaving the dead pile of his self-sacrificing mentor behind. So ends the play. The final sentence of Kesey's novel runs. "I been away a long time"--away from a larger and more concrete world, out of touch with reality, after having surrendered to a society that is cruel, but not ultimately invincible. He may be "big again" in the play, but it was McMurphy who taught him to walk tall, and McMurphy is dead. Regaining contact with reality, leaving behind...