EQUUS
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave,” Martin Dysart remarks in the course of Peter Shaffer’s 1973 Equus. The world’s randomness is the backdrop against which Shaffer sets his exploration of the search for order. And the forging of a personal religion, with all the pantheistic glory and terror of that process, is at the heart of this Interplay production. A documentary would merely have traced the circumstances leading a shy, disturbed teenager to horribly mutilate several helpless animals, for which aberrations he’s sent to Dr. Dysart, a child psychologist. A Freudian study of sexual-initiation trauma would have included the details of the boy’s double shock just before he commits his atrocities: the discovery of his father’s fallibility and his own sexual initiation at the hands of a local Lilith. And after all, thousands of young girls go through a horse-crazy stage only to transfer that affection later to their own species. It’s not implausible that the rejection of animal friends for human in a male child undergoing a similar rite of passage would be more extreme–even to the point of gruesome violence, for as Dysart tells us, “The extremity is the whole point.” But Shaffer’s not interested in facile or everyday explanations.
As Dysart probes deeper and deeper into Alan Strang’s psyche, he gradually uncovers a bizarre creed that twists together Christian theology, gleaned from religious iconography, totemic myths from childhood stories, and a highly personal interpretation of common things–in this instance horses, which have often been likened to divinities. This tangle of beliefs produces a ritual cognizant of life and death, suffering and transcendence–indeed, the entire theoleptic union of Man and God. (“Sex is not just a biological matter, but spiritual as well,” Strang’s mother had told him, little realizing the dimensions her offspring would give this precept.)
