Word: equus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...EQUUS leaves, it will be with your intestines. And I don't stock replacements...
...spoken by Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist in a rural English hospital, and they are directed to Alan Strang, his 17-year-old patient who, at the moment, is under hypnosis. Alan has been institutionalized after blinding six horses one night in the stable where he works on weekends. Equus is the imaginary horse god, the product of Alan's tangled mind and troubled childhood and it is Dysart's task to exorcise it from him. The question on which Peter Shaffer's play turns is, simply, does Dysart want...
...ounce of the original Broadway play's intensity is lost in the Leverett House Art Society's excellent production of Equus. Presented as theater in the round, this production wastes no time in drawing the audience into the action and the play releases its grip only after two--and-a-half hours of troubling and, ultimately, cathartic drama. Under Brad Dalton's able direction, the cast, comprised almost entirely of newcomers to the Harvard stage, skillfully sustains an intense atmosphere of tension and provides a few examples of superb acting...
...like some puzzling psychological axiom, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and Dysart cannot account for the difference. It can only be testimony to the dark powers of the mind that, somehow, through the mixing of these impressions and influences there arises the imaginary Equus, part god, part object of desire...
...retain the play's intellectual breadth and formal audacity without betraying the movie medium's demand for matter of fact naturalism. And he persuaded Shaffer, who had been disappointed by film adaptations of his plays, including The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus, to write the Amadeus screenplay, reshaping Amadeus from a madman's memory play to a more realistic musical biography. Recalls Shaffer: "It was like having the same child twice...