Word: dysart
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...indeed, seem confined as most of the action takes place on a black platform surrounded by wooden railing and decorated only with three hard benches. The platform mostly serves as the stable where 17-year-old Alan Strang blinded six horses and as the claustrophobic office of Dr. Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist who must "cure" Alan. The performers move in a seemingly eternal sunset--the muted orange glow of Dan Scherlis' and Alexis Layton's gorgeous lighting design--dissolving only when we venture into Alan's tortured memory, where he relives his psychotic pains and pleasures in an evilly beautiful...
...Dysart guides us through the circuitous caverns of Alan's consciousness and unconsciousness, where bizarre images casting terrible shadows ricochet off the walls of his mind, slowly settling to form the horror he cannot confront. The struggle between Dysart and Alan (and their private bouts with their respective neuroses and psychoses) is at the core of Equus, giving the drama its chess-match tension as two fierce wills clash and two magnificent intellects trick and torment the vulnerable souls possessing them. Sadism and compassion feed on each other as Dysart and Alan peer, with frightening perception, into one another...
...none of the outrageous improvisation that marks Sellers' acting when he feels a project is going badly. "I was amazed at the discretion with which he handled the part," says Co-Star Melvyn Douglas. "Never was there a suggestion of having overblown any sense of it." Adds Richard Dysart, who played a doctor: "The texture of that man's work! He gave Hal Ashby two or three different characters?not that varied, but different. I began to see that there was a through line for each, that they were consistent." Ashby thus had not just alternate scene readings...