If you look at the rhythm of this blog over the last many months, you will see that my contributions have been sporadic, tied almost entirely to my latest adventures on the stage. The December radio play was a lot of fun, but for many months now I’ve been itching to get back into a more traditional stage production. I am thrilled to share that I’ve been cast as Martin Dysart in a local theatre production of the 1975 Tony-award winning play Equus, written by Peter Shaffer. Rehearsals begin next Monday (2/10/2025). The show runs the first two weekends of April at the Abilene Community Theatre main stage.
Last Spring, ACU theatre professor Gary Varner told me that ACT was producing the play as part of their upcoming 70th season. Gary encouraged me to give the play a look and thought I should consider auditioning, and so last Spring I checked out the script from the ACU library and read with this possibility in mind. The play made me deeply uncomfortable. Could I really see myself in a play described by some as a “psycho-sexual drama”? The original play and the 2008 Broadway revival, starring Richard Griffiths and Daniel Radcliffe, include nudity (something our production will forego). The minimalist, stylized nature of the play demands a lot from both actors and audiences. Can a community theatre pull such a show off? I wondered.
I sat on all of this over the summer, but in the Fall I started thinking more about the show, and the itch to perform wouldn’t go away. In the Acting II class I took last Fall, I performed Dysart’s opening monologue of the play, and this semester, throwing caution to the wind, I finally I decided to audition. I am so happy to have the opportunity to be on stage again. For the next two months I’ll be rehearsing for a show that is a stretch for non-professionals to perform. It will be my first show with Abilene Community Theatre, a nonprofit company whose own recent history testifies to their bravery and willingness to embrace challenging, important work. A few years ago they produced Angels in America, if one needs any more evidence of their boldness.
What can I say about Equus? It is a challenging, adult play. The story revolves around a series of sessions between Martin Dysart, a highly regarded child psychiatrist, and Alan Strang, a 17 year old who for unknown reasons blinds 6 horses with a metal spike. Dysart seeks to learn more about Strang’s life and those things that led him to such a shocking act of violence. On the one hand, the play is a sort of mystery psycho-drama in which Dysart’s sessions draw the audience into a narrative of the troubled life of this boy. But more fundamentally, the play is a thickly layered, rich, and beautifully written story about all of us–the ways that the “dry, yeastless factuality” (one of my favorite phrases from Yann Martel’s book, Life of Pi) of modern life renders us impotent to the sort of ecstatic joy that people once found in religious devotion and erotic connection. Dysart sees in Alan those very things that he yearns for in his own life, and the tragedy of the play is Dysart’s own: by the play’s end he comes to the realization that he is responsible for rooting out these very things in this boy’s life, to make him “normal.” What might it be like to discover that you are in a helping profession that not only does not help but that you actually believe is harming those patients you serve?
I am in the middle of a teaching semester, so opportunities to blog about the show may not be as frequent as in the past summer shows that I’ve done. The title of this post comes from the very beginning of the play. Dysart begins the play on stage, speaking directly to the audience:
“With one particular horse, called Nugget, he embraces.
The animal digs its sweaty brow into his cheek,
and they stand in the dark for an hour–like a necking couple.
And of all nonsensical things–I keep thinking about the horse!
Not the boy: the horse, and what it may be trying to do.”
Dysart sees in this horse some desire that he cannot explain, and he also sees that the horse itself is bridled, chained and controlled. In the play Dysart comes to believe that he is just like the horse–bridled and chained by “old language and old assumptions” that he cannot escape.
Dysart has several thrilling monologues that I cannot wait to perform. The play begins with a Dysart speaking to the audience. Act II begins with another Dysart monologue, and the play concludes with Dysart’s final words to the audience, a scathing monologue about the lives that all of us live in our present world. Dysart is chained, much like the horse, and so are all of us. For me, the role itself is a very heavy lift, similar to Sweeney, though with Sweeney Todd I had the advantage of being very familiar with the music prior to being in the show. Dysart is on stage for the entire play. For this show, I have two beat books, one for each act.
Anyway, this is my update. Of all nonsensical things, I can’t stop thinking about the horse. It’s something I’ll be thinking about a lot over the next two months. On Thursday evening when leaving callback auditions, I told the director, Scot Miller, how much I was looking forward to being around “theatre people.” I’ve been fortunate enough to hang out with ACU theatre majors these last two semesters while sitting in acting classes (I’m in Shakespeare this semester!). I am so happy that I’ll be working alongside some fellow actors to tell a story on stage together. More to come!