Equus, by Peter Shaffer

It's been quite a few years since I saw this in the theater, as a student production at William and Mary. At that point in time, theater didn't really mean much to me. It was never the kind of experience that did anything more than simply entertain me. Equus changed all that - it was a powerful script with the kind of production that leaves a lot for the viewer's imagination to fill in. I found the play extremely moving and to some extent it shocked me out of my wits by the depth of the ideas it discussed.

In the last 10 years, I often thought about this play. The production I saw was so well staged that the scenes continue to haunt me to this day. I can close my eyes and see the sequence of events unfolding; I can hear the ominous humming of the horses that announces something big is about to happen. Then, Equus came back to newspaper headlines when Daniel Radcliffe, the young actor who plays Harry Potter in the movies, signed on to appear in a new production. What everyone was talking about was the fact that the character he plays appears stark naked. (Take that, Dumbledore!) There was little mention to how powerful this play is.

So, in order to revisit this amazing text, I picked up a paperback and read it as fast as I could manage. I discovered that most of what I saw in the theater was guided by careful instructions in the text. What I saw was very much like what it was meant to be: a shocking peek into the mind of a disturbed young man, who had just pierced the eyes of a number of horses, through a series of psychoanalysis sessions. The story discusses how misguided religious practices can affect the upbringing of children, how we often engage in hypocrisy when we define what normal is, how close minded we can be and how this hurts the development of our children. Powerful stuff. Read it and think about it; it's worth every second you spend with it. Best of all, though, is see it on stage first!