The Living Room’s absorbing Equus revival reveals the plays limits

The ideas underlying Equus, Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play, seem bound to connect to some psyches more than to others. The Tony Award–winning drama at the Living Room Theatre, in the very capable hands of director Jeff Church, is thought-provoking, inventive, even riveting. But it’s the actors and the staging here that must compensate for the playwright’s tenuous approach to a difficult subject.

Shaffer’s play takes as its inspiration a crime that the English playwright heard about indirectly. The fictional Equus, which takes place in southern England, is his attempt, he has said, to make sense of a “dreadful event” committed by “a highly disturbed young man.”

The disturbed young man here is 17-year-old Alan Strang (Matt Lindblom), who has been sent to a hospital, rather than to prison, by magistrate Hesther Salomon (Amy Attaway), to be treated by psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Rusty Sneary). This teenager’s criminal act, which occurred one night in a riding stable where he worked, was the blinding of six horses with a metal spike. (In this production, the horses number four.)

Shaffer’s play is about the boy, but it begins and ends with the psychiatrist, and it’s as much his story as Alan’s. As we follow the course of Martin’s relationship with his patient and his exploration into Alan’s family, upbringing and state of mind, we accompany the doctor through Shaffer’s sophisticated storytelling, a layered investigation that takes us gradually deeper into these characters’ lives.

Alan’s inner life shows us a mishmash of religious belief and sexuality, borne out of a childhood influenced by an atheist father, Frank (Forrest Attaway); a religiously devout mother, Dora (Bonnie Griffin); an enchantment with horses; and a growing interest in the opposite sex. In a misguided transference, this teenager has created his own theology, one that blends ecstatic worship with sexual arousal. He’s like an accident from which we don’t turn away.

Sneary is excellent as a doctor in a sterile marriage and suffering from “professional menopause.” He finds his own kind of escape in ancient Greece and its many gods and is deeply affected by Alan and the boy’s “surrender to the primitive.” In a contained, nuanced performance, Sneary’s Martin draws us into this story, and his commanding presence holds us there.

Lindblom is a competent co-star, particularly in those scenes that bring his past to life, but also in more subdued re-enactments. Though he seems, in the early going, much younger than 17 (in portrayals that aren’t flashbacks), he owns Alan and captures the character’s intensity, energy and “passion.”

In smaller but significant roles, Attaway lends quiet power to Alan’s father, in a portrayal memorable for its depth and feeling, and Griffin, as Alan’s mother, conveys a strong maternal bond as well as hurt and incomprehension. Amy Attaway brings intelligence and charm to her role as a steadying force. And in brief appearances, Rachel Leyh, as Alan’s co-worker and friend, and Paul Burns, as the stable owner, also do good work.

The horses are enacted by actors (Jordan LaForce, Bradley Turner, Vincent Wagner and Amy Hurrelbrink) who wear masks (by Church, Kate Mott and Shawnna Journagan) and walk on elevated metal shoes that create a familiar balletic clip-clop (movement by Vanessa Severo), sounds that Shaffer’s script uses for effect. David Kiehl’s ethereal music contributes to an otherworldliness that’s accentuated in Alan’s dreamlike recollections by Shane Rowse’s lighting design.

The Living Room makes efficient use of a small, compact stage on the main floor of the theater, incorporating a sliding panel that opens to a shadow box–like space upstage for scenes outside the hospital. It’s a tight and disciplined production — until it moves upstairs late in the second act. That far more vast area affords some striking staging and a symbolic representation of the stable’s interior, but breaking the fourth wall and ushering the audience into another room stall the play’s momentum and dilute its intensity.

But it’s the playwright’s message that ultimately weakens the story’s impact. Shaffer (who also wrote the award-winning Amadeus) wanted to create with this play, he has said, “a mental world in which the deed could be made comprehensible,” but his material lets us down. While Martin’s struggle — with his doubts and his choices on the boy’s treatment — moves us, it doesn’t make sense in the context of the boy’s crime and what led to it.

Despite Equus‘ thematic shortfall, the Living Room’s committed telling and the production’s high quality go a long way toward making up for it.