Exhibitionism

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Equus: Probing the Darkness

Running time: 2 hrs, 50 min

Not to suggest that director Michael Costello's staging of Peter Shaffer's exceptionally well-made play is anything short of impressive, but his philosophical rationalization behind this production undervalues the play's deeper message as well as the extraordinary work of his cast, crew, and designers. "Televisions have become our priests," he writes in his director's notes, "the malls our cathedrals, and our spirit is imprisoned in a black pit; and we wonder why our children commit horrific acts of violence." While this sentiment is in many ways true for an America that seeks crisis resolution with high-powered weaponry, the horrific act of violence that is the foundation for this rather English play has nothing to do with television or malls or even the imprisonment of the spirit. It is not some modern, suburban atrocity played out by children upon children. Rather, it is the culmination of primal cultural forces at vicious odds: sexual oppression, peer pressure, parental hypocrisy, and the struggle of the individual to define his world. When young Alan Strang blinds six horses in what everyone believes to be a feral rage, he is acting on motives of the utmost spirituality, a madness brought on by a hopeless and inflammatory contradiction between belief in his personal god and his equally powerful and incomprehensible teenage sexuality.

This play is perfect fare for a gutsy university theatre program and a perfect vehicle for augmenting an ensemble of talented young actors with a seasoned professional from whom the next generation of theatre stars can learn -- a mentoring role taken on in this Mary Moody Northen Theatre production by guest artist David Birney. The St. Edward's University student cast here holds up its end of the bargain beautifully, with strong performances throughout. Sophomore Jeffery Mills leads the way with a moving, energetic, and ultimately triumphant performance as the desperate Strang. This young actor leaps into the many challenges of his role. Physically and emotionally, Mills captivates -- at once sympathetic, humorous, deeply sad, and wildly free. Matthew Addison Cross and Lee Eddy prove a strong complement to Mills in two of the toughest roles for student-aged actors: the repressed Strang parents, Frank and Dora. Cross convincingly evokes the hypocritical, lower-class, faux-gentleman father, a man uncomfortable with every aspect of his life: his sexuality, his economic status, and his myopic atheism. He takes Frank Strang's inability to communicate with his son and imbues it with the dismal quality of a man who has just plain given up. Eddy provides an equally solid turn as the religious, aloof, prim mother whose duteous nature and pride rub against her motherliness, chafing and scarring it. Elizabeth Wakehouse makes a professional yet distant Hesther Salomon, the attorney who brings young Strang into the caring world of Dr. Martin Dysart.

David Birney portrays Dysart, a psychiatrist struggling with issues that go beyond his treatment of psychotic children. Dysart's struggle has begun long before he encounters young Alan, but it is Alan that is the catalyst for Dysart's emotional ignition. Yet Birney clings so hard to the emotional content of his role that the self-deprecatory humor and the wonder (and terror) of his discoveries -- professional and personal -- get submerged in an overreaching pathos. Birney begins the play as its narrator with a trembling voice, already shattered by events the audience has yet to view. Shaffer has written some tremendous arias for his doubting doctor, and Birney gives these a mixed reading. He renders a nightmarish dream of self-incrimination with a gripping rhythm, but succumbs to maudlin bathos with the play's finale. It is the interaction of Birney with Mills that brings out the most honest, intriguing, and entertaining work from this veteran actor.

Designer Michael Massey takes an interpretive slant to the set, evoking the classical world so often referred to by Dysart even while maintaining the text-prescribed theatre-in-the-round. The horses are effectively rendered by costume designer Eric Reyez-Abbott and brought eerily to life by six actors in black jeans and T-shirts, work boots on metal mini-stilts, and bronze-wire horse's head masks. Max Thomas, as the horse Nugget, is particularly praiseworthy, achingly tall on his toes at the play's climax.

This work is one of the seminal plays of the 20th century, one that revels in the immeasurable creativity and individuality of the human consciousness even as it probes the darker parts of humanity's self-inflicted misery. So much more than some Columbine-like shoot-'em-up, Shaffer's scathing, perceptive play asks a universal, essential question about the relationship between man and god.