Just a quick note to keep you updated on all things FRCP! 

Performances will be April 19-21 and 26-27 (Friday and Saturday performances @ **7:30pm**, Sunday performance @ 2pm) at the Greenville Area Community Center. Tickets go on sale Monday, March 25th.

Tickets can be ordered online at http://flatriver.showclix.com/ or by calling 1-888-71-TICKETS. You can also purchase tickets through our Facebook page as well! Search for the FRCP-Flat River Community Players page (be sure to Like us once you find us!) and you will see the GET TICKETS link. Tickets can also be purchased at the door, the day of the performance. If you have any problems with your online purchase, please feel free to call our Box Office Manager, Julie Jakeway, at 616-874-9761

In the Flat River Community Player’s Spring production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Randle Patrick McMurphy (Sean Wahlfeldt), a criminal who has been sentenced to a fairly short prison term, decides to have himself declared insane so he’ll be transferred to a mental institution, where he expects to serve the rest of his term free of prison labor and in (comparative) comfort and luxury.

His ward in the mental institution is run by an unyielding tyrant, Nurse Ratched (Jessica Gilbertson), who has cowed the patients (most of whom are there voluntarily) into dejected submission. When Mac sees how submissive the patients are under Ratched’s tyrannical control, he resolves to antagonize her and undermine her authority as much as possible. Mac takes over the ward and leads the others out of introversion, staging a revolt so that they can see the World Series on television and arranging a rollicking midnight party with liquor, chippies, and a couple prostitutes (Lindsay Tallian and Amanda Estill-Lofts).

Cuckoo’s Nest features a cast of unforgettable supporting characters, from the stoic “Chief” Bromden (Scott Wahlfedlt), a muscular Native American who has schizophrenia, Billy Bibbit (Alex Wahlfeldt), a suicidal, stuttering manchild whom Ratched has humiliated and dominated into a quivering mess. The background noise of the many inmates (Kilo Mathewson, Adam Ellsworth, Martin Rodgers, Jeremiah Souza, Ric Davenport) and orderlies (Tomas Negron, Patrick Fuller, Marisa Clark, Matt Lofts), as well as their status as pawns in the ongoing chess match between McMurphy and Ratched, breathes life into the story.

While the issue of patient abuse in mental wards has long since become old news (thanks in part to the novel written by Ken Kesey), the universal issues of human dignity and compassion are what ultimately makes this play tick.

(Written by Whitney Codling)