Sometimes a Great Notion (PCS)

[April 9th, 2008]

The trouble with adapting any well-loved work of art to a new medium is that no matter how loyal you are to your source material, fans of the original will never accept your work on its own terms. For acclaimed director and playwright Aaron Posner, creating a stage adaptation of Ken Kesey’s 1964 masterpiece about the ugly history, people and weather of a soggy Oregon logging town poses an additional problem: The book is so damn big there’s just no way to squeeze the thing into a theater without some serious clear-cutting.

To his credit, Posner’s done a fine job of reducing Kesey’s 640-page tome to a 2 1/2-hour family drama about the messy relationship between half-brothers Hank and Leland Stamper, an odd couple tasked with fulfilling an impossible logging contract. It’s a good story, and Posner’s use of a chorus of townspeople and direct address to simulate the novel’s omniscient and stream-of-consciousness narration actually works quite well. But, for all its strengths, it isn’t Sometimes a Great Notion. What you’ll see at Portland Center Stage is maybe a third of Kesey’s work, and it might be more honest to take the lead of the U.K. distributors of Paul Newman’s 1971 film and retitle the play Never Give a Inch.

Posner serves as both writer and director of the show’s world premiere, and the work he wrangled out of his PCS design crew is nothing short of extraordinary. Tony Cisek’s set is a mountainous pile of timbers that manages to be both beautiful and eminently functional, Jim Ragland’s incidental music is folksy without being silly, and Casi Pacilio’s falling-tree sound effects shake the Armory’s foundations.

The ensemble’s opening-night performance was just so-so. While the leads are excellent—Karl Miller (Leland) and Tobias Andersen (Henry) are especially good—there are some weak spots in the chorus. Local comedy geek Kevin-Michael Moore shouts his way through his lines, and Chris Murray expresses little beyond an adolescent sneer, and they all play up lines about the weather—Kesey’s chief antagonist—for inappropriate yuks. They should cut it out. Why does playing rural working men drive actors to caricature? Maybe it’s the hard hats.