Attendance Make Up: Play Review - Equus

The play, Eqqus, was written by Peter Shaffer in 1974. It was performed by the College of Charleston at the News Journal Center in Daytona Beach, Florida. The story of the play is about a teenager, Alan Strang, who blinds several of horses, by gauging their eyes out, in the stable of his workplace. Most of the story takes place at the psychiatric hospital, where Alan is sent to help him get through this ordeal and to find out what actually happened and why it happened. The psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, tries the whole entire play to get Alan to talk openly about the whole ordeal. He tries to do this by prying and asking a lot of question to get him to remember, which Alan does not want to do. He just wants to act like nothing happened. With time Alan builds up some trust towards Martin and finally breaks down and tells him of all that happened and why he did what he did. He tells Martin of his horrible relationship with his parents and even his intimate and kind of awkward relations with his boss’s daughter and how all this eventually caused him to lose it and gauge the horses’ eyes out.

The play to me was an extremely deep portrayal of psychotherapy. Exposure was the key. Martin wanted to Alan to expose everything. The exposure terrified Alan though, until he finally trusted Martin enough to tell him of the disaster that had happened. But, I thought it was kind of boring at times because of the fact that most of the play takes place in the same spot, the psychiatrist office, where most of the time it is just the two of them sitting and talking or Martin trying to get Alan to talk. It was very dramatic though and at one point very surprising. The part that stunned me without warning was when Alan and his boss’s daughter lose their clothes to full nudity. I give the two actors major credit for going through with it. It took major guts to do that in front of a huge crowd that there was. At the time I really did not see it coming. I guess it really did not make me extremely uncomfortable because of how deep and dramatic the story was all ready at that point. It kind of just went with the flow. The play had its points where it was funny too so you could get off the edge of your seat for a little bit, whether it was a joke here and there or just because of how crazy Alan was in the head. Overall, it was an good performance. It was just good, because of the dull and boring parts of the play. The thing that kept my interest was the drama and intensity throughout the story.