"...reaches such stunning, visceral, and astounding heights..."

July 15, 2005 performance, reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Rarely in our contemporary theatre do we have the opportunity to experience catharsis, that purging of the emotions by pity and fear that leads to exaltation. Good plays, well done, are the staple willingly applauded by Berkshire audiences of summer theatre

But the Berkshire Theatre Festival's production of Peter Shaffer's Equus reaches such stunning, visceral, and astounding heights that it leaves one knowing to have lived through an emotional experience one will always remember with a sort of awe.

Knowing the play well, having seen it performed over the years and having read it with students in my college classroom, I brought my admiration for it to the theatre, along with visualizing a staging along the lines described meticulously by Shafer in his text as to be played out on a bare square stage, surrounded by actors and audience, while a battery of lights shone down on a clinical operation.

What I experience instead was a play in which the six towering white pillars, set at first symmetrically against a black cyclorama were to whirl in and out in countless configurations, realistic and clinical, domestic and tasteless, surreal and limitless, and in the case of the stabled horses, beautiful and poignant.

This setting, designed by Beowulf Boritt, bathed in the lighting of Kevin Adams, and washed by the sounds (gongs as well as music) of Ray Schilke provided the area on which the multiple scenes could unfold.

And then there were the horses, Nugget and his five stable-mates, a chorus of dancers who dancing doubled as stage hands, gloriously horses in the great masks they at times wore, whirling as the great strap-like manes streamed behind them. Choreographer Gus Solomons, Jr. had honed the young strong bodies into strength and beauty. He had taken his "horses" to a local stable to observe the horses’ movements so they could evoke those movements as they performed in Jess Goldstein's costumes — ones in which they could become rider as well as horse — real and unreal.

The plot of this play is well known: a psychiatrist is challenged to search for the reasons a seventeen year-old boy would, in one evening, blind six horses. And his search becomes a detective story (as horror-filled as the search of Oedipus) as he gradually moves to revelation, both of the boy's motivation and of his own life, and of the great sin he feels he is committing in "curing" the boy.

The last line in the play is spoken by the psychiatrist, "There is now in my mouth, this sharp pain and it never comes out." He has made the child "normal" and never again will the child equate equus with god, or know passion.

To bring this off at the level of emotion that envelopes the audience, however, demands strong actors and the stage is full of them. Director Scott Schwartz has cast them well and moves them about with expert timing and consummate skill in his use of space and mood.

Randy Harrison as Alan Strang the distraught teen-ager becomes the character from the moment he chants his first singing commercial. He has experienced an ecstasy the doctor has never been capable of. He hides his secret; his domestic, religious, and sexual conflicts as long as he can, even gleefully reversing the roles and interrogating the doctor, but finally, seduced by a fake "truth pill," he is stripped naked to curl up in his bed — a "normal" young boy who will never again know passion. Every moment is beautifully and convincingly played.

As Martin Dysart, Randy’s unwilling psychiatrist, Victor Slezak is heart-wrenching, in self-deprecating monologs and in confrontations with the boy. Unhappily married, bound to a boring wife, unable to feel his life has had any meaning, he envies the child he must "heal" and try to transform into a life as meaningless as his own. His tragedy is as deep as Alan's and as wrenching in its immediacy. He knows he is lost and accepts his loss with a defeated objectivity.

As Dysart's friend, Roberta Maxwell, who refers Alan from her court to Dysart's reluctant care, unwittingly helps defeat him as she mistakenly urges him to relieve the child from his pain. She is compassionate, convincing, energetic and well cast and though never revealing it, probably loves (and understands) the psychiatrist more than his wife ever has.

Alan's mother, played convincingly, defensively, and movingly by Pamela Payton-Wright, has unwittingly brought both religion and horses into Alan's mind. It was she who read to him of horses, especially the biblical ones, and who, when the religious picture of a Christ replete with many wounds was taken from his wall, helped him replace it with the picture of a horse to whom Alan could transfer his god image. She will never understand what she did, but she did all in ignorant love.

His father played by John Curless is brutal, ignorant, and self-defensive. His puritanical wife's bed drives him to slip off to porno movies. His character is an unsympathetic one and he so plays it. He plays a role early in the tragedy when he drags young Alan off the sea-side horse and sets the stage for much that follows. He inhabits his role convincingly.

Tara Franklin moves winningly through her minor roll of Jill, the girl who by introducing Alan to sex will bring on the tragedy. She undresses with self-confidence and moves in her nudity with grace and no embarrassment. She understands, too late, that her open giving of herself under the all-seeing eyes of horses, has toppled Alan's fragile world.

Nugget (Steve Wilson), chief horse and also a horseman, brings his grace and physique to the horseback scenes. It is to him that Alan kneels. He deserves it as actor as well.

Such praise may seem over-effusive; it is written in euphoria. I went to this play expecting to enjoy it and came away humbled by my simple expectations. I thought I knew the play well, but at this production found myself engulfed in it more deeply than seemed possible. I am grateful for the experience.

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