The following article was written for the October 2000 issue of Theatre Circle Insights.

"How are you going to do Equus?"

That was the question a Theatre Circle member asked earlier this year. She had seen the 1977 film, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Richard Burton, and found it difficult to imagine how several of the scenes might be represented in the theatre.
       She is not alone. Peter Shaffer's Tony Award-winning Equus is a play that explores uneasy terrain: psychology and the practice of psychiatry; religion and the search for God; sex and love in modern life. In the play a young man, Alan Strang, is hospitalized after blinding six horses. Under the treatment of psychiatrist Martin Dysart, Alan reveals his story in the play's action, a story that is played out before us, carrying us into the heart of his heart, into a world of love, worship, and fear.
       Dysart follows this journey, and as he is slowly admitted into Alan's strange, yet passionate world, the psychiatrist realizes that his own life is empty of meaning. When Shaffer's play works in the theatre, it invites us to explore deeply our lives, both inwardly and within the context of our society.
       The Lumet film depicts Alan and Dysart's story realistically: apart from moments when Burton (Dysart) directly addresses the camera, the motion picture presents the action using familiar realistic conventions, including lifelike locations, sets, and-importantly—live horses.
       Peter Shaffer, who wrote the screenplay for Lumet's film ("Not that it did much good," he has stated), was discourgaged with the results: "What depressed me about the film is that it didn't have any of the images I wanted to see in it. I was very disappointed in the visual side of it." The film version of Equus suffered from this realistic style. For the scene in which Alan attacks the horses in the stable, Lumet shot the action from different angles and edited the shots by quickly cutting from one to the next, as if the stable's horses had somehow found their way into Janet Leigh's shower in the Bates Motel. Shaffer was not able to watch the stable scene during its shooting, nor has he watched the scene on the screen, "so painful," notes C. J. Gianakaris, "was its crude literalism."
       Realistic literalism is the element that should be absolutely absent from a performance of Equus. Shaffer's text, which owes much to John Dexter's 1973 London staging, guides a production team away from trying to create a realistic world and asks them to build a theatrical space in which performance and ritual take place. The setting is a neutral space with the flexibility of Shakespeare's stage-for our production, Jared H. Porter's scenic design, reflected in the sketch and photo of the set model, shows a place where the action, story, and design create an environment that easily changes locale, mood, and time.
       The relatively neutral floor and walls become a blank canvas for David Lapham's lighting design, which virtually paints the mood and supports the action of the play from moment to dramatic moment.
       The production of Equus eases us into the drama's difficult journey using theatrical devices that both protect us from the reality they depict and involve us deeply in the actions they present. While "no horses are injured in tonight's production," horses do appear on stage in the guise of actors in performance. Carefully choreographed in their movement by professor George Pinney and costumed by Amanda K. Bailey with masks of copper tubing and kothornos-like hooves, the actors-as-horses serve two theatrical functions: through their performances, the actors embody the reality of Alan's horses in a way that real horses cannot. The horse-actors create the god that Alan sees within them, realizing through their movement and sound the presence of EQUUS, the holy animal that rules Alan's life and gives it meaning.
       And at the same instant that the actors invest this deeper reality in the horses, they also create a distanced representation of the animals. Because the horses are deliberately abstracted, we know that, on one level, when they are attacked by Alan's mimed hoof pick, the actor-horses are not actually injured; but we also feel, on another level, that crashing energy and helpless panic of witnessing a "real" attack on innocent animals. This disturbing effect that we experience when we see Alan blindly stabbing at costumed, choreographed, and masked actors-this effect might be very similar to that felt by the Athenean audience of classical Greece as they watched masked actors undergo the high moments of tragedy, as the tragic world fell apart and the lives of the characters changed forever.
       "If ever there was a play that has no business being a movie," wrote Frank Rich in 1977, "Equus is it." By abandoning the devices of the theatre for film realism, Sidney Lumet lost the dual power of performed intimacy and theatrical distancing that enabled Shaffer's play to be brilliantly and successfully told on the Broadway stage for three years. The University Theatre production of Equus, under the direction of professor Murray McGibbon, will embrace and exploit every legitimate theatrical device and gambit at its disposal.
       That's how we'll do Equus.