The Hypocrites present Peter Shaffer's EQUUS

Equus' strips away stable notions of normalcy
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
October 5, 2004 by Hedy Weiss Theater Critic, Chicago Sun-Times

With its intoxicating mixture of sex, religion, psychiatry and social class -- and its stormy meditation on the roots and power of passion, both spiritual and physical -- Peter Shaffer's "Equus" has always been a theatrical winner, even if the finer points of the playwright's reasoning may have been hotly debated.
The play, which first rocked the London and Broadway stages in the 1973-74 seasons, is now receiving a riveting revival by director Sean Graney and his troupe, the Hypocrites, who have taken up residence in an intimate Athenaeum Theatre studio space. It's perfect material for Graney, whose own writing frequently deals with the split between superficial human relationships and the kind of soul-wrenching passion that either gets suppressed or destroyed in those brave or crazy enough to seek it out. And the production is a potent reminder of why this drama continues to generate such visceral excitement.

The premise of the play is at once mythic and pedestrian. Alan Strang (Geoff Button) is a 17-year-old boy from a working-class family in the English provinces, and he has just committed a horrifying crime: the inexplicable blinding of six horses housed in the stables where he has worked devotedly for the past year.

Hester Salomon (the high-spirited Deanna Boyd), a local magistrate, appeals to her friend, Dr. Martin Dysart (Kurt Ehrmann), a respected child psychiatrist, to take Alan on as his patient and restore him to some definition of "normalcy." Strang, a middle-age man locked in a passionless marriage -- a man all too clearly aware of his inability to experience anything even approaching the sublime and irrational -- resists at first. And then, the more he probes Alan, the more he wonders if what he is doing -- trying to remove or alter the most inexplicable, fervent and, yes, even profoundly destructive elements of Alan's nature -- is not, in its own way, criminal.

The dramatic core of the play is built around Dysart's attempt to gain Alan's trust and to encourage him to reenact the events that led to the blinding of the horses. There are hints to be found in the boy's parents. His emotionally distant father, Frank (Robert McLean), a printer with a strong Marxist bent, has a chilly relationship with both his wife and son, whom he forbids from watching television, "the opiate of the masses." His solicitous mother, Dora (Karin McKie), is a teacher filled with religious fervor. But as Dora points out, there is more to any individual than the sum of his or her genetic inheritance.

For Dysart, Alan's unique wiring -- and his almost pagan gift for "worship" as he terms it -- is close to divine, and he sees the fantastic beauty, as well as the pain, that results from Alan's twisted and simultaneously exalted response to the world. In fact, he envies Alan's ability to fully experience life with an immediacy and intensity beyond his own imagining. This, of course, creates a crisis within him.

The first act scene in which Alan mounts his favorite horse, Nugget (the tall, graceful J.B. Waterman), rightly has the play's greatest charge, as the boy's psycho-sexual-religious connection to horses reaches a literal climax. But it is his first sexual experience with a girl, Jill Mason (played with a fine blend of wildness and vulnerability by Halena Kays), that proves calamitous. And this feverish scene, in which both he and Jill shed all their clothes and begin to make love, is as emotionally naked as it is literally so.

Button -- small, swift and direct yet subtle -- does a beautiful job as Alan, with not a shred of sentimentality or preciousness creeping into this most demanding role. He makes you feel Alan's rage and confusion, and also his total obsession and elation. As for Ehrmann, he lunges into Dysart's big, self-lacerating speeches with great fire and intelligence, although, like several of the actors here, he is perhaps at just too consistently high a pitch.

Graney's staging is impeccable in its economy and, at the crucial moments, ferocious in its propulsion. And his set design -- a haunting blue-streaked wood for the barn, and simple Greek-style horsehead masks for the six actors whose stirring moves in the stables are perfectly choreographed -- have the ideal iconic beauty "Equus" demands.

"He blinded six horses with a metal spike." Such is the crime that sends a surly 17-year-old named Alan (the excellent Geoff Button) to the mental ward in Peter Shaffer's 1973 British-set drama, "Equus." It's a premise just gruesome enough to get your attention and hold you as Alan's psychiatrist (Kurt Ehrmann), a man in the throes of his own, slightly warped existential crisis, delves into his patient's psyche to dredge up that all-important answer: Why did Alan do it? If you follow Shaffer's reasoning, it's got something to do with passion--the religious, quasi-sexual, self-flagellating kind--and at the end of the day, isn't passion more important than numb docility? You may not necessarily buy Shaffer's point, but it's worth thinking about anyway. Though somewhat pat in its conceit and dubious in its psychiatric mumbo-jumbo, "Equus" is actually quite a good play. And with this potent revival by The Hypocrites--sharp, funny and intellectually engaging--it is easy to overlook the weaker points. Again, Sean Graney shows why he is one of the most interesting directors working in town these days. Talk about an eye for casting: Graney packs his ensemble with actors who give even the smallest roles a compelling nuance. (Erin Myers, in her brief role as a nurse, brings a perfect tang to her lower-class English accent and she has a striking ability to go from perkily efficient to snarly in the blink of an eye.) As Alan's favorite horse, Nugget, J.B. Waterman--costumed by Graney and Jennifer Grace in brown velour yoga pants and a horse-like headpiece--absolutely nails the physicality: the backside arched out, the legs taut, the halting, pompous steps. He even gets the heavy sound of exhaling breath right. It's the kind of performance that only works if the actor goes all the way with it, and Waterman goes all the way and then some. It's not every director who can manage that feat.

After spending so much of my free time in theaters over the past five years, I treasure the words, “90 minutes, no intermission.” I treasure them not only because it means I will have a bit of personal time left in my evening, but also because when a production goes over the two-hour mark, it’s often because its ponderous and self-indulgent, the result of a playwright or director too in love with his or her work to think of cutting anything.

Thankfully, The Hypocrites’ powerful and compelling production of Peter Shaffer’s Tony-award winning play, clocking in at around 2-1/2 hours, is not a minute too long. This is a play and a production (with spirited direction from the inspired mind of one of Chicago’s most exciting young directors, Sean Graney) that does superbly what all good theater should do: grabs you in its clutches and refuses to let go. You forget about time. It achieves this feat by giving you a deeply engaging story, characters you can care about (even ones that have done reprehensible things), and a lot to think about after you leave the theater.

By now, Shaffer’s psychological tale of a boy who has inexplicably blinded a stable full of horses and the psychiatrist who unearths the disturbing rationale behind this atrocity is fairly well known, in part because of a 1977 film version starring Richard Burton and Peter Firth, and because of its sensational subject matter. Because this is a sensational story and because, on close reflection, it does have its flaws (the therapy scenes which comprise a big portion of the play are formulaic in their rhythm of build up, revelation, and catharsis that all come a bit too easily), it’s important that its production be put in the care of highly creative people. Happily, the Hypocrites have more than earned that mantle, and they continue to do so with Equus. One is so engaged in the story and the fine performances (mainly from Geoff Button as Alan, the boy at the center of the story, Halena Kays a young girl who ignites Alan’s passions in more ways than one, and Karin McKie as Alan’s beleaguered mother, Dora), that let us see into the hearts and souls of these flawed, but very human characters. J.B. Waterman is the “lead horse”, Nugget, in the show’s sextet of horses and its to Graney and his actors’ credit that these human horses are never self conscious or hokey (which they could be in lesser hands), but sexually charged representations of equine grace and power. We understand, from the chorus’s fine work, Alan’s confused sexual attraction and his quasi-religious worship of the animals. In the role of psychiatrist Martin Dysart, Kurt Ehrmann does solid work, although he could turn down the intensity in spots (only in spots), so that he would have a fuller connection with the other actors on stage (he sometimes employed a faraway, thoughtful look when he should have been reacting to whoever was on stage with him). Minor quibble, though. Ehrmann makes logical choices to making an emotionally charged part real and understandable. It is the psychiatrist’s questioning of the good he actually does with a case like Alan’s and how the case reflects his own life that form the basis of the play and allows its central metaphor (about the value of normalcy in a world where true artistry and passion are in too short supply) to spring elegantly from the boards.

The Hypocrites really deliver here, giving us a show that resonates with intelligence and sparkles with creativity. It’s one of those “don’t miss” occasions people like me don’t often enough get the chance to champion.

Equus
Highly Recommended
Reviewed by Tom Williams, www.chicagocritic.com

Peter Shaffer’s Tony Awarding winning play (Best Play for 1975), Equus was inspired by a BBC report of a British boy who inexplicably blinded twenty-six horses in a stable. The story fascinated Shaffer, provoking him ‘‘to interpret it in some entirely personal way.’’ His dramatic goal, he wrote in a note to the play, was ‘‘to create a mental world in which the deed could be made comprehensible.’’ The result is a riveting journey into the world of insanity told through the eyes of a self-doubting psychoanalyst. Peter Shaffer’s haunting psychodrama eerily comes to life in a brilliant production directed by the amazing Sean Graney for The Hypocrites Theatre Company.

With a set (designed by director Sean Graney) depicting a stable complete with fences and benches, Equus is presented as a mystery---why would the boy blind six horses when apparently he adored them? Why?

Equus is the story of Alan, a 17 year-old boy who blinded six horses and the search for meaning and motivation for his actions. The encounters with his psychiatrist Dr, Dysart (Kurt Ehrmann), who is trying to “normalize” Alan making him safe for society. Equus reveals Allan’s story as well as Dysart’s self-doubting personal analysis. We learn why Alan did the nasty deed and experience Dysart’s epiphany. Shaffer uses psychological realism together with dramatic devices as masks and animal personification to dramatize the story.

Not a conventional mystery, in which solving the crime relieves tension and restores stability, instead, Dysart's search for the meaning of Alan's act leads him to doubt his personal commitment to his vocation. The closer he comes to understanding his patient's motives, the more confused Dysart is about how he should respond to Alan and the mental world he has created. The enigma is in Equus himself. How can we account for the horse-god?

After his first meeting with Alan, Dysart dreams he is a masked pagan priest cutting the hearts from hundreds of living children in an elaborate ritual. For the rest of the play, Dysart agonizes over questions he has never before considered: By helping the children he sees become "normal," is he actually harming them? Is his allegiance to psychiatry a defense against the passion and spiritual mystery that inform Alan's worship of Equus? Or is he simply cracking up?

Kurt Ehrmann, as Dr. Dysart, powerfully with bursts of rage and painful emotions portrays the troubled doctor. He delivers Dysart’s monologues with conviction and he cleverly maneuvers Alan with his ‘tricks.’ Equus stands tall on Ehrmann’s riveting performance. We see Dysart’s gradual destruction in Ehrmann’s eyes.

Shaffer has all the actors sitting on benches, like jurors evaluating the plays dilemmas and inviting us to weight in as more than simply voyeurs. Fitted with horse-head masks, the six actors, especially J. B. Waterman as Nugget, Alan’s favorite horse, deftly convey the spiritual essence of a horse as a god. Alan’s imagination is cleverly created through the horses.

Karen McKie, as Dora, Alan’s mother, delivered a powerful explanation of Alan’s behavior in act two that shocks the doctor to his core. Nice work here by McKie.

Geoff Button’s Alan carried the troubled boy with enough mystery to deliver his pain in a well timed performance that saw Alan emerge from uncooperative to acquiesce as he vividly relieves the passionate world of sexual and religious fantasies that he lives through in his horse-God Equus. Button completely emerges himself into Alan’s fantasy. Geoff Button’s performance was convincing.

Equus contains three marvelous performances---Kurt Ehrmann’s wrenching Dysart---Geoff Button’s amazing Alan and Karen McKie’s strong Dora. Sean Graney’s direction kept the dramatic tension flowing which added to the power of Shaffer’s themes.

The last scene leaves us to ask what Dysart has done and what he should have done. We can accept his assessment that "the Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his Priest" or Hesther's insistence that "the boy's in pain.... That's all I see.” We may embrace Dora's view of the Devil as "an old-fashioned word, but a true thing." Whatever view we adopt, we are left with Dysart's anguished "What dark is this?" and the question of how to understand his last line: "There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.”

See this engrossing play and answer Shaffer’s questions for yourself. The-hypocrites have given us a marvelous production of a masterful play..