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IN THEIR ROCKING and rolling high school days, Gary Sinise and his band varied their usual sock-hop gigs with a date at the state mental institution in Elgin, Ill.
Who knew?
Certainly not the actor, a bass guitarist in that other life. His flinty blue-gray eyes behind round-framed glasses light up as he recalls a brief episode in the early 1970s significant now only because Sinise has returned to the lunatic asylum-as a patient. Or, rather, his character, that rambunctious rogue Randle P. McMurphy is there, being evaluated for "possible diagnosis of psychopath," in the counterculture send-up "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
Sinise has been playing the cocky, gum-chewing McMurphy for the past year in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company revival of Dale Wasserman's play, based on Ken Kesey's 1962 novel. The production originated at the Chicago theater company's home, ran on the West End in London and has come to Broadway's Royale Theatre, opening Sunday, April 8.
This isn't the actor's first time playing crazy. He was a dangerous psycho in last year's film "Reindeer Games," but that doesn't count; the guy wasn't institutionalized. Nor was he remotely lovable-audiences do identify with and lustily cheer for the irrepressible McMurphy as he battles authority in the form of big Nurse Ratched.
One of the most famous anti-heros of 20th century American literature, McMurphy most famously stepped from the pages of Kesey's novel to be played by Jack Nicholson in the 1975 film. For that riveting performance Nicholson won not only an Oscar but a whole generation of admirers simpatico with his-and McMurphy's-penchant for acting out.
In that group was Sinise himself, for whom Nicholson was one of several icons whose realistic approach to acting inspired members of Steppenwolf, the theater company that Sinise co-founded in the mid- 1970s.
"I was a huge fan of the film, I saw it so many times," Sinise says on a recent morning in the innards of Rockefeller Center. A warily pleasant, compact guy who obviously subscribes to the no-big- deal-going- on-national-TV school of apparel (long-sleeved black jersey, black jeans), he has just been interviewed by Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today."
But he was equally impressed with the stage version of "Cuckoo," which,...