Word: dysart
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Onstage nearly every minute of the play, James Goldstien wrestles relentlessly with the role of Dysart. When he has a firm grasp on Dysart, Goldstien is very fine indeed, but when he loses confidence, his performance slips into woeful mediocrity. For much of the play, his stiff gestures and forced, dramatic delivery remove all naturalness from his performance, making him look like someone trying toact. When he addresses the audience--as he does frequently--Goldstien fidgets, never quite knowing what to do with his hands. He ruins some of Dysart's wittiest (and in their wry humor, extremely revealing) lines...
...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...
...PLAY opens, Dysart is an emotional void, a man whose powerful intelligence has numbed him to his painful existence. A dry, analytical shrink, his self-obsession reaches gargantuan proportions. Given to endless Dostoyevskian musings about his place in the Universe, Dysart recognizes the shallowness of his life, but refuses to deal with it--instead, tossing off witty, erudite quips about his plight. His ability to diagnose and categorize all his quirks and impulses merely intensifies his self-loathing. He realizes his compulsion to play God, to tackle the illnesses of his patients so that he can absorb their agony, thus...
That Goldstien's talent erupts in Dysart's scenes with his patient is understandable since Jon Magaril's performance as Alan is extraordinary. In the same way that Alan draws in Dysart, Magaril mesmerizes the audience, simultaneously seductive and repulsive. Magaril makes Alan the truly compelling victim of the Modern Age: alienated, practically illiterate, addicted to television. Alan is the perfect Freudian delight (with a twist) who hates his father, loves his mother, and desperately needs something to worship, something to absolve him of his sins in this universe where "God is dead...
...Alan's aliveness that Dysart cannot bear, the fact that his worship of Equus gives meaning to his existence: "That boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt at any moment of my life...and I'm envious." Caught under Alan's spell, Dysart--who dreams of the Delphic oracle and eagles bearing prophecies--can think of nothing more monstrous than "taking away someone's worship." But, as a shrink, he is the self-proclaimed high priest of the God Normal. He must exorcise the boy's vital spirits, the phantasms of "insanity" that bring Alan...