All Eyes on RCC's 'Equus'

By Yvonne Flack
Real Critics Blog Editor

When Peter Shaffer’s Equus first debuted at the Plymouth Theatre in 1974, the production received a standing ovation. The New York Times reviewer, Clive Barnes, hailed the production and the play as adding “immeasurably to the fresh hopes we have for Broadway's future.” As a result, Shaffer garnered a Tony for Best Play in 1975.

More recently, however, discussion of Shaffer’s masterpiece has focused on the controversy surrounding Harry Potter film star Daniel Radcliffe’s appearance in the lead role of the troubled stableboy, Alan Strang. Parents of Harry Potter fans were outraged that the child star would be appearing on stage in a role which required nudity, ignoring the profundity of Radcliffe’s move into live theatre and, specifically into a role requiring such emotional depth and intensity.

When first written, the play was intended for popular consumption on Broadway, but it sank into psychological depths that Broadway seldom saw. It was riveting, harrowing, and, for some audience members, too close for comfort, as a portion of the audience was seated on stage within feet of the action.

This intimate staging was reflected in Riverside City College’s laudable recent production of Shaffer’s masterpiece, astutely directed by Gary Krinke. The entire audience was seated on the stage and the production was performed in the round (or in this case, in the square). The main set, designed by Jerry Longman, was comprised of a central square resembling a horse’s box stall with rails on each side and two mobile benches. Two platforms, where the actors not involved in the immediate action sat throughout the show, flanked the stall on opposing sides. The five actors who played the horses, Cy Abad, Jordan Maxwell, Matt Baxter, Tyler Maxwell and Jimmy Mobin who played Nugget and the horseman, also remained onstage for the majority of the show. Downstage was a box used to simulate Alan’s bed. Nugget’s stool rested upstage center, directly below the looming metal horse head that dominated the set and the tormented psyche of Alan Strang, passionately played by Zachary Hallet.

The closed in set mimics and reinforces the girdled mind of Alan Strang, his reluctance to open up to the child psychologist Martin Dysart, convincingly portrayed by Tom Patrick. And the uncomfortable proximity of the audience reinforces Alan’s fear of being watched. At any moment, the actors onstage could look out and see dozens of eyes staring back at them. Eyes play a prominent role in this play and are a necessary component to any theatrical act. Theatre, to be theatre, needs witnesses. Actors, like the ritualistic religious zealot Alan Strang, simultaneously fear and need to be watched. Alan was simultaneously comforted and tormented by the idea that his horse-god, Equus, was watching him.

Alan’s eyes also torment his doctor, giving him a recurring nightmare in which he sacrifices children in a ritualistic way, and as he slides his knife into their chests in a surgical way that even his dream-self shudders at, it is Alan Strang’s eyes that stare back up at him. But it is those same passionate and intense eyes that first gain the attractions of the beautiful and sexualized stablehand, Jill Mason, delicately played by Laura Delhauer.

Delhauer appeared in a bright pink, by far the brightest color in the play, off-the-shoulder sweater, and tight jeans that showed off every curve of her body. The sweater was highly unbelievable as the outfit of a stablehand, but its bright and feminine color served its purpose to portray her as a character more alive than the others, and the little exposure of skin across her shoulders painted her as more sexually liberated than the awkward, shy and repressed Alan.

Delhauer’s light and flirtatious attitude and provocative clothing introduced Alan to a woman who starkly contrasted his repressed and closed off mother, to the reality and possibility of a relationship with a woman who was nothing like the religiously repressed and oppressive Dora Strang, movingly played by Jennifer Lawson.

Lawson’s performance was a highlight in this production. She was simultaneously repressed by her husband, Frank, played by Scotty Farris, and her intense Christian beliefs, but modern enough to feel that Frank’s banning of television in the Strang house was extreme.

Patriarchy ruled over Dora’s life. Dora’s fear, anxiety and pain, as portrayed by Lawson, were heart-wrenchingly convincing. Her fear of Frank, her obvious rejection of sexuality--right down to the tall socks she wore under her shin length skirt, obscuring any glimpse of flesh--the oppressive patriarchy of the Strang house, and her mounting guilt (as she comes to question whether or not the religious zeal she pressed upon the young Alan truly could have contributed to his mental collapse) exploded in Act II when she gets in a fight with Alan at the psychiatric hospital. Dora was clearly tormented by guilt in this scene but flat out rejected any responsibility in Alan’s actions as she coldly and defensively tells Dysart, “Whatever’s happened has happened because of Alan....If you added up everything we ever did to him, from his first day on earth to this, you wouldn’t find why he did this terrible thing--because that’s him; not just all of our things added up.” Dora goes on to blame the Devil, who she claims is unquestionably real and present.

Dora’s religious zeal allows her to repudiate any guilt in how her son has turned out. Her religion is violent and may have contributed to her son’s violent reaction to the fear of his god Equus witnessing his sex act with Jill, but it is an allowed zeal. Until it turns directly violent or detrimental, almost all levels of religious ardor are endured. This is why Dora let the young and impressionable Alan put an extremely violent depiction of Jesus at the foot of his bed. When Frank takes exception to the violence of the image, he replaces it with a striking photo of a white horse which soon takes the place of Jesus in Alan’s religious framework. Thus begins Alan’s worship of the god he found in horses, the god whose name only he knew, Equus.

Alan’s worship of the horse-god Equus is frought with sexual tension. He describes the white cream which drips from the mouths of bridled horses, he speaks of them with enthusiasm as “naked,” and spends hours embracing them in the dark “like a necking couple.” The production emphasized this as the actors playing the horses appeared shirtless. Every imperfection, tattoo, hair and bead of sweat glistening on the bare backs and chests of the horses underlined the eroticism of Equus. The production was raw and almost uncomfortable as it aligned human sexuality equally with gods and beasts. The few times that Alan mounts and rides the horse-men in this production further stresses the eroticism. Alan’s descriptions of the binding of Equus with a metal bit borders on sadism while it is simultaneously linked to Jesus’s pain and humiliation at the hands of the Romans in the process of his crucifixion. Alan’s worship is pure ecstasy, and Shaffer’s play under Krinke’s direction, blurs the line between sexual and religious rapture.

It is being witness to the passion of Alan’s worship that brings Dysart into his ultimate conflict: Is it right to take away someone’s worship? When Dysart is done with Alan, and only a shell of a human remains, has he really done the boy a service? It is in his moments of crisis that Tom Patrick, as Dysart, directly addresses the audience. He worries and frets over his own safe and meticulously planned out life, void of adventure and void of any type of passion that even approximates Alan’s impassioned worship of Equus. As a passionless doctor, Patrick was a perfect casting choice. His appearance was geeky and reserved, his voice never raised in anger except once when Alan’s taunting hit too close to home, and his monologues had the reason of the educated elite behind them. In the end, when the final breakthrough in Alan’s case is made, it is sheer anxiety and anguish that dominate Dysart’s character, rather than relief at being able to cure yet another troubled child.

The breakthrough in Alan’s case happens when we finally see the moment of his crime reenacted. The reenactment, like Alan’s other therapy sessions, blends seamlessly with the current action in Dysart’s hospital, as lines within the flashback and the therapy session clamor one on top of the other. We watch breathlessly as Alan mercilessly blinds his god with a hoof pick; the torment of god’s ever watchful eyes too much to bear.  The tension in this scene, like so many others in this production is built to an uncomfortable breaking point through sound, movement and lighting. Through constant movement, dim but focused lighting, ambient chanting and effective use of the ensemble, the tension escalates as Alan blinds the five horses in the stable, repeatedly shouting “Nothing!...Find me!...Kill me!”

Zachary Hallet’s commitment to his character and the agony of this scene was inspiring. Not only does the actor playing Alan have to portray the true fear, distress and rage of his character at this point in the play, but he has to do it completely naked--a challenge for an actor of any caliber. As Alan’s tormented soul is bared for the whole audience, his vulnerability and exposure is complete in every sense of the word. And the proximity of audience to actor only makes this exposure more brutal.

But Alan is not the only character in crisis in this play. Dysart’s outlook on the world and his role in it has become suddenly very clear as he holds the crumpled and defeated Alan in his arms. Dysart has become Equus, with the chain in his mouth, commanded by society to be the ultimate judge of the youth who come through his hospital, the ultimate judge of who gets saved, questioning if the price of salvation, the price of Normal, of a world without pain, is too high. He stands in the dark with a pick in his hands, striking at heads.