Time Slows the Horses of 'Equus'

"Equus" seems quintessentially '70s today. Peter Shaffer's play, a sensation in 1974 when it opened on Broadway, tells the story of a boy who one night inexplicably blinds six horses. But the play is really about the boy's court-appointed psychiatrist, Martin Dysart (Dave Higgins), who becomes tormented by the idea that if he cures the boy he will rob him of his individuality, his passion. Dysart begins to have terrible dreams about slicing children up with a scalpel; he's afraid to remake the boy into his own image--that of an over-educated everyman whose most intense imaginative pleasure is in reading about ancient Greece. In the character of Dysart, Shaffer captures a fear of the era. With the confusing euphoria of the '60s effectively over, with the new passion for leisure suits and the dry look, what will we all have to live for?

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The Pasadena Playhouse offers a straightforward production of the play. Jules Aaron directs cleanly, his physical staging modeled on the original John Dexter version, though his actors behave more naturalistically. Some of the audience sit on the stage, in a semi-circle under stone columns that speak of Dysart's beloved Greece and make clear that the audience is judge and jury in this trial that pits passion against normalcy. But the play has become dated and shows its seams--its rhetoric is not as provocative as it once was. Its homoerotic subtext feels flaccid now. What was one decade's flash-point is often another's cliche.

The alienated boy is named Alan Strang, and he is played in a white T-shirt and a young-Brando sneer by Eion Baily. We are introduced to Alan's alienation before we meet him--he will only speak to Dr. Dysart in the voice of television ads--he sings the old "double your pleasure" Doublemint ad for starters. Every decade has its own romantic attachment to mental handicap (hello, Forrest Gump), and "Equus" certainly indicates that Alan should be instantly intriguing, rather than merely irritating.

Alan has been raised by a pedantic and tyrannical father (convincingly played by Mark Capri) who is a strict atheist, and a mother (Amanda Carlin) who is devout and who feeds the boy Bible tales in secret, which makes them all the more lurid.