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EQUUS By Peter Schaffer
My first experience with this play went something like this: I was flipping through the channels when I came across a movie in which a very naked man was riding a horse at night, yelling ecstatically as he urged his mount to greater speeds. It is important to note that I did not have cable TV at the time, so seeing a naked man on television was somewhat surprising. So I turned to my then-girlfriend and asked, “Just what the HELL are we watching?” She knew what it was, but confessed she had never seen the play or read it. Being the inquisitive fellow I am (and hating to watch a movie in media res), I checked the book out of the library the next day. Based on the one scene I saw out of context, I expected it to be an artsy piece of dog-shit. Turns out it’s one of the most powerful pieces I’ve ever read. Equus is a play about a young man, Alan Strang, who is forced to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Dysart, after blinding six horses with a hoof-pick. Although there are other characters in the play, the action mostly revolves around the discourse between these two, as Dysart tries to discover what could drive someone to commit such a brutal act. The blinding itself is far less graphic onstage than in the film version (where they used real horses), but is emotionally startling nonetheless. So why would Alan do such a thing? One might guess that he hated horses, but one would be wrong. Through sessions with Dysart, we come to find out that Alan’s upbringing and home life were so rigid and strict, so dull and repressive, that he invented a fantasy world for himself to inhabit—one in which horses figure prominently. Horses are the only things Alan is passionate about; in fact, they are the only things he has been allowed to be passionate about. And Passion is a central theme to Equus. “Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship? ...that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life... I envy it.” These are the words of Dysart, who is charged with making Alan “normal” again. But what does that truly mean? Alan’s fantasy world is more real to him than our own, and through it he knows Passion and worship unlike anything he has in the “real” world; a depth of feeling most of us never achieve. Through these sessions, Dysart is forced to examine his own life; a life in which he settled— a life devoid of life. What is “normal”? Again, Dysart: “The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes...It is also the dead stare in a million adults.” We are all of us Martin Dysart, for how many of us have felt we have lost our link to the spiritual? How many of us have settled for what we can get, rather than pursue what we hope for? When Passion is ripped away, can the results be anything less than disastrous? Read the script, or better yet, see it performed on stage. If you can’t see it live, check out the movie, which features Richard Burton in the same role (his performance is not as bad as he generally was). Equus shows us that a “normal” life is not always the best way to live, and that a life of convenience is often one of dreams deferred.
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