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In San Francisco circa 1970, when bell-bottomed jeans were the fashion and anti-war marches the standard, an unknown local director, 27-year old Lee Sankowich, opened a production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at the Little Fox Theater. Critics savaged the show, smugly aware that Dale Wasserman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's first novel, which had opened on Broadway with Kirk Douglas in the leading role of the rebellious McMurphy seven years previously, had closed after only 10 weeks of performances.
But Sankowich managed to beat the rap. For one thing, his production was different from others that had gone before. With Wasserman's blessing, Sankowich had rewritten parts of the script himself, using the novel for inspiration. "I went much further than I had a right to go," he says now. It worked, though.
Herb Caen, venerable columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, championed the show, publicly scolding his own paper's theatre critic. The ace-in-the-sleeve was Kesey himself, a cult hero among college students, notorious as the Merry Pranksters' acid-king. Every night the line for...