THE STAGE:
Weales, Gerald
HORSE CHOLAR THE STAGE Spontaneous applause in the theater tends to come when an actor is suddenly so good-or at least so startling-that the audience can no longer simply absorb the performance...
...It is a cry for the power of irrationality...
...There is something a bit too concocted about the mechanism for my taste, the transformation of therapy into detective story, answering why rather than who...
...Many of the scenes are simply informational (how I got my job at the stable) or conventions of cross-generational conflict (running into dad at the porn flic), but the combination of eroticism and stage trickery (the actors on metal cothurni wearing masks) give force to the scenes with the horses...
...It may be no more than a gag line guying black stereoytpes (All Over Town) or the presumed dangers of New York City (The Prisoner of Second Avenue...
...The audience, momentarily one with Alan, shares his moment of high passion and, then, as he collapses in exhaustion, we presumably become the doctor again, feeling not relief for an exorcism but a sense of loss...
...There is another occasion for such audience reaction, however-a moment of recognition when a line, an idea, an attitude strikes home and elicits a response...
...Both the positive and the negative reviews had brought me to the theater expecting to find that Peter Shaffer's new play was simply another fashionable success-one part theatricality, one part kinky subject matter-and there I was surrounded by fellow playgoers whose hands were testifying to the validity of the play's main assertion about the dryness and the limitations of so much of life...
...Not that Shaffer is offering his Dr...
...This is the figure who should embody the substance of the play...
...Equus clearly touches a nerve in the New York audience, as it did earlier in London, which means that it is something more serious (i.e., more timely) than the effectively theatrical play it so obviously is...
...In the Plymouth Theatre the other night, when I saw Equus, there was an extended burst of applause following the first long speech in which the psychiatrist indicates that he envies his patient for having touched real passion, real pain...
...it may be more sustained passages such as the contemporary-sounding sentiments that called up pockets of applause during the Philadelphia engagement of the new Lincoln Center production of A Doll's House...
...it was almost a request: give a man a horse he can love...
...GERALD WEALESD WEALES...
...He has substituted the suffering horse for the suffering Christ and sees himself in both roles...
...he is an incipient centaur, at once God and worshipper, victim and victimizer...
...Not that I am completely taken with it as a play...
...The accumulation of information about Alan is doled out like clues, teasingly, until we find out why the boy who loved horses blinded six of them, mutilating his own God...
...The play edges for two hours toward its big final scene, played in the nude, in which the young man fails sexually in the presence of his accusing gods and blinds them in horror and revenge...
...His marriage, his tourist's commitment to Greece, even his work, except for this one case is given to us-sometimes filtered through a friend-as a verbal exercise, reality as cartoon in the mocking manner of Butley...
...Yet, he has no existence outside the consulting room...
...Less nuance than heightening hysteria, it demands and gets a tour-de-force performance by the actor playing Alan (Thomas Hulce the night I saw the play...
...We file out into the New York streets and-if I read that applause correctly-go back to our own narrow lives...
...Dysart as representative man-or even representative psychiatrist-but the response was more than an appreciation of Anthony Hopkins' playing of the troubled doctor...
...There is an inevitable fascination about the young man for whom the horse is both God and a sexual object...
...turn to plastic...
...Its main dramatic action lies in the psychiatrist's longing for an experience, however dangerous, as direct (as "primitive," he would say, tongue slightly in cheek) as that of the young man he is attempting to help (cure...
...Equus, it seems, is more than a high-class melodrama...
...HORSE CHOLAR THE STAGE Spontaneous applause in the theater tends to come when an actor is suddenly so good-or at least so startling-that the audience can no longer simply absorb the performance silently...
...It would be foolish to try to reduce Alan Strang's delusion/faith to a few sentences because the reality of his situation-for him, for the psychiatrist, for the audience-lies less in its content than in its intensity...
...Or an echo...
...yet, the character remains only one remove from a narrator, a stage manager for the unfolding of the boy's story...
...No well-brought up audience can resist the combination of sexuality, religion and violence, and Shaffer attempts to weaken any possible resistance by organizing the play as as a series of scenes in which the patient's acting-out becomes theatrical presentation...
Vol. 102 • April 1975 • No. 3
