'Cuckoo's Nest' review: Intense, endearing

Randle P. McMurphy, the irrepressible slacker from the novel/play/movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," rings so true that we can believe he sprang from author Ken Kesey's real-life experience working in a ward with mental illness. Dale Wasserman's 1963 Broadway adaptation captures that impulsive spark so appealingly that we can't blame McMurphy for loathing his passive-aggressive nemesis, Nurse Ratched.

At BayWay Arts Center, Rob Schindlar as McMurphy and Joan St. Onge as Ratched deliver these polar opposites -- bipolar, perhaps? -- with such intensity that we're convinced the actors detest one another. (Such is not the case.) A supporting cast of inmates, led by Derek McLaughlin as loquacious Dale and Kevin Kelly as sexually repressed Billy, enrich the scenario with endearing human frailties. John Steele Jr., as spineless Dr. Spivey, epitomizes institutional ineptitude.

The dramatic key to "Cuckoo's Nest" rests with Chief Bromden, the stoic American-Indian patient played with imposing physicality by Sandro Scenga. But his character's inner rage never rises to the boiling point demanded of the shockingly inevitable denouement. Marian Waller's otherwise astute direction, played on Bob Butterley's appropriately antiseptic set, falls just short of electric.

WHAT "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

WHEN | WHERE 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays (2 p.m. May 28), through June 1, BroadHollow's BayWay Arts Center 265 E. Main St., East Islip

TICKETS $25 (advance discounts); 631-581-2700, broadhollow.org