Word: alan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Alan E. Heimert, Cabot Professor of American Literature, who served as Parker's undergraduate tutor and supervised her doctoral research here, said last night that he was "very surprised" by the no confidence vote...
...mostly reveals his problems of a passionless life to the magistrate, and Sheila Smith's acting--also more muted and restrained than in the Broadway production--helps throw his expression of the need for individual passions into greater relief. She scolds him sharply for even thinking of not curing Alan, saying "I'll take your skills over his passions any time." By being less sympathetic--making the rapport between she and Dysart less open--Shaffer's play gains more substance...
...more substance the better. Because Shaffer has Dysart overstate his case in places about the dullness of modern society. Dysart says that by getting rid of this obsessive passion in Alan, he will make the boy's life boring, as if his life could never be full of new passions (some perhaps just as psychotic). Shaffer also seems to make this assumption that when Dysart finally finds out what caused Alan's problems (as simple as these causes are), he will be cured, when that seems only to be the beginning. This explains Shaffer's retraction in the program: that...
WHAT IS FINALLY the most mysterious of all things in Equus--Alan need not be as opaque as he is at the end, but that serves the action and suspense--is what people want for Alan Strang. His mother wants him to be happy and religious, his father wants him to improve his character, his girlfriend just wants him to be able to toss in the hay with her, the magistrate wants him to be without pain, and Dysart wants him to retain his passion--or at least toys with the idea. And it is in Dysart that this desire...
Lurking beneath this tugging and pulling a child to become something, is the most deadly of all passions in Equus, more deadly than the dull, passionless society Dysart depicts. Alan Strang probably wouldn't have been in the world he was if he hasn't been thrust there by a society that pushes people into a frame of being without helping them understand the dimensions of their own roles in that society or of all the emotions they will experience: pain and pleasure, virtue and vice, boredom and passion. Equus helps a little in that direction, and while it could...