Miles Rules the Roost in ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’

“To go back and do an American classic as it’s been done before makes no sense,” said actress Joanna Miles, who recently opened at the Beverly Hills Playhouse as the infamous Nurse Ratched, ruling the roost in a mental hospital in Dale Wasserman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” (In the 1975 movie, Louise Fletcher played a domineering Ratched to Jack Nicholson’s bad boy McMurphy.)

Miles compares the experience of playing Ratched to her Emmy-winning stint as Laura in a 1973 TV production of “The Glass Menagerie,” with Katharine Hepburn. “I decided to play Laura not as tragic, but noble,” she said. “When Tennessee Williams saw it, he was so pleased, because nobody had ever done it that way.

“This play (‘Cuckoo’s Nest,’ first produced in 1963) came out of a very shut-down Puritanical time, when breaking rules hadn’t been part of the game. So someone like McMurphy who came along and said, ‘Let’s tear down these walls’ was very exciting.

“These days, the same person comes along and you’d have some questions about him. And the image of Ratched has changed too.

“She comes off as more credible now, trying to curtail McMurphy. She tells him, ‘You’ve got to stick to the rules.’ I hope audiences will think, ‘Maybe she’s right; he should behave himself.’ In the end, of course, he pushes her too far and she does something unconscionable. But I don’t come in wringing my hands, plotting evil. It’s more fun if the character can win you. And by the end of the play, you realize she’s the craziest one of them all.”

BLOODY AFFAIRS: It’s an aptly titled “Murder Among Friends” in Bob Barry’s six-character comedy-thriller, a Pegasus Productions show at Friends and Artists Ensemble.

“There are three main characters: an actor, his wife and his agent,” said director Peter Dolan, who staged the piece last year in Garden Grove. “The wife and agent are having an affair, plotting to murder the husband. The actor and the agent are having an affair, plotting to murder the wife. But the agent is the one who’s murdered.”

CRITICAL CROSS FIRE: Sean Penn toplines “Hurlyburly,” David Rabe’s vision of Hollywood types searching for love, sex and transcendence, at the Westwood Playhouse.

Said Sylvie Drake in The Times: “ ‘Hurlyburly’ is a play about stasis. Almost nothing happens beyond the continuous ebb and flow of the house’s habitues . . . .”

From the Herald Examiner’s Richard Stayton: “All (of the male characters) are psychotic, neurotic, depraved, tortured, indulgent, obsessive male chauvinist opportunists who talk nonstop about--who else--themselves. Such low-life qualities provide ideal material for a top-of-the-line cast.”

Daily Variety’s Amy Dawes was not impressed. “If there are redeeming or illuminating elements in this miasma that gave a glow to this piece in its New York run, directed by Mike Nichols, neither Rabe nor this cast succeed in carving them out.”

In Drama-Logue, Lee Melville found the 1984 piece sorely dated: “Rabe is commenting about losers in a business where success is fleeting, at best. But as the play drones on, the purposelessness of the characters’ lives having been made early, there seems little point in continuing this facade.”