Word: shaffers
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...first thing you notice about Equus--sometime between the first garbled summary of its plot and the first couple of minutes of its spellbinding action--is how incredibly well Peter Shaffer has turned his dismal raw material (which he insists is a true story) into a play that works so well it hurts. A teenage boy is "possessed" by the spirit of Equus, the horse-god he creates, worships and fastens his sexual energies to. This possession is not altogether a bad thing; the boy is so absorbed in his world that he reaches a level of emotional intensity unavailable...
...this isn't its most profound presentation. That madness may be better than sanity--who are we, who have never known true madness, to judge--goes back as far as you want to take it into Western thought. What Equus does is make it into good theater. Shaffer's play is propaganda for the Dionysiac element in human nature, with a rhetorical impact that outweighs its criticism of psychiatric assumptions. Shaffer doesn't take the extreme position of many modern playwrights, that madness is better than sanity; he only goes so far as to say that madness might be better...
Part of the drama lies in watching Dysart wield his liontamer's chair, part in watching what happens to him as he is forced to compare his own barren life with the daily ecstasies of his patient. But the most powerful part of the drama is Shaffer's use of the psychiatric technique of abreaction--the literal replaying of key events--on stage. This allows him to get anything he wants on stage without any question of its being out of place. The choreographed ritual of the blinding, over in an instant, is much less like melodrama when it comes...
...Shaffer is guilty only of creating a middle ground, somewhere between the simplistic views of his audience and the kind of complexity that never works on stage except in Shakespeare. Shaffer's portrayal of Strang's parents reveal him at his weakest. The father is a self-proclaimed atheist and Marxist, but a sternly Puritan advocate of the work ethic, who, it turns out, is also a patron of dirty movies. The mother is an indulgent Christian who takes the first opportunity to renounce any responsibility she may bear for her son's condition: Alan was a fine boy until...
...John P. Shaffer, a University cook, said yesterday that last Wednesday someone stole enough sugar from the Eliot House dining room "to last three or four weeks...