The School of Theatre and Dance will present Peter Shaffer’s classic play, Equus, in Westhoff Theatre with 7:30 p.m. performance on March 31, April 1, 5-8, and a 2 p.m. matinee performance on April 2.
Equus, written in 1973 by British writer Peter Shaffer, follows the psychiatrist Dr. Martin Dysart in his attempts to cure a severely repressed teenage boy named Alan Strang who has transferred years of religious and sexual guilt onto a horse named Nugget. Equus has, in time, become confused as a story about bestiality—when such a thing never actually takes place in the play itself. The play tackles subject material much more universal than this: the inevitable conflict between instinct and civilization and the deep psychic consequences of religious and sexual oppression.
Master’s in Theatre Studies student, Thomas Brown, sat down with Assistant Professor of Theatre Education and Equus Director Jimmy Chrismon to discuss how given Equus’ dark subject matter, he has not only had to organize the work of several designers and actors in an emotionally healthy, trauma-informed manner, but he has also been forced to invest extra efforts to correct misgivings about the show.
T. When did you first experience this play? What about it has meant so much to you?
J. From my undergrad, I remember the lore around Equus. I finally read it as an adult and just loved the story; it always stuck with me. Then, I saw the Broadway revival with Daniel Radcliffe and Richard Griffiths and I was just completely blown away. From that performance, it’s just haunted my mind, a ghost in the back of my head.
I had a theatre company in the Carolinas before I moved here. There was a local stable and green area near where I lived, and they were going to let us use the space to produce the show. But then things fell through, and we didn’t get to, so the itch to do this show and tell this story with a group of people has always been there since.
When a show for this season fell through, my husband and I were literally sitting on our back porch having coffee when we got the e-mail saying, ‘we’re not going to be able to do it,’ and my husband said, ‘it’s not like you can do Equus.’ I reached out and asked about it, and it was like, ‘yeah, let’s do it.’ It gave me a perfect opportunity to put to work my research with trauma-informed practices, and intimacy training, literally hands-on. Seeing if the stuff I’ve been researching works is a really cool process.
T. You recalled having a sense of lore surrounding the show when you first heard about it. In your opinion, what is the reputation of the show? Do you think that it accurately represents what the show is about?
J. I think it’s a heavy show. It deals with heavy topics, it deals with mental health, it deals with religious and sexual oppression. One of the main characters hurts animals in a very violent way. So yes, the show is heavy, it is dark.
It’s also very funny in places. I think the audience needs to prepare that it’s okay to laugh. Because when we plunge down into the darker stuff, we have to come up for air to be able to enjoy the ride of the story.
The other misconception with the show is that people assume this is a story about someone who has sex with a horse. Zero horses are violated.
The animal is actually a Christ figure. Sexuality is a part of the story and the climactic moment of the show, and the horse is there, but it’s not about bestiality. The horse also acts as a father figure in a way; Alan’s father is the one who forbids riding the horse in the first place, and he is also the one who introduced the picture of the horse in place of the Christ picture in Alan’s room. And there begins the confusion of those images.
The play deals a lot with parental guilt. The mom believes, “we did nothing wrong, we raised him the way we were supposed to, he knew the religious ways,” and with the dad, “did I mess up? Am I the reason this happened?”
T. Could you talk a little bit more about your work in trauma-informed care and intimacy training?
J. So that all began the year before I moved here to take this job. I directed a production of Spring Awakening with a university in South Carolina, and at the end when we did a post-mortem, the actors said they really wished they had something to help ground them after those really heavy rehearsals. And then my husband, who a mental health counselor, he was like “do you have anything for this?” I didn’t know what to do to help them.
So that began our journey digging into this, and specifically for me, working with theatre teachers, asking how can we still do this heavy material and keep our students, technicians, audiences, and ourselves safe? That was where our research began, where our two worlds collided between his work as a specialist in children and trauma and mine with people who teach, who teach kids. What skills could we pull from the mental health world? What techniques could we pull from that?
To help with that grounding, I got trained in theatrical intimacy, because it’s all about consent, taking care of the performers, how to have healthy practices in the rehearsal room and performance space to take care of actors.
That naturally led to what we’re doing with Equus, from the very beginning of the process. With Equus, there’s a contractual obligation to do the nudity, even to the point where we have to do the stage directions that are on those pages. I can’t even be creative with those.
All the way through the process, from the beginning, we learned boundary exercises from the very beginning. If I ask you to do something you’re not comfortable with, you get to tell me, and I, as the director, get to find a new way to tell that story a different way.
Derolling at the end of every rehearsal, too—or we, as actors, physically warm up our bodies and voices, and we get into character with our makeup and costumes; but we are rarely taught a formalized process of leaving that character in the space when we end. So we do that every night.
They have a debrief form for rehearsals; if the actors and technicians want to send me a message to say, “hey, this really concerned me tonight, can we touch base about it?”, they’ve got a place they can do that.”
T. How can audiences prepare for this show?
J. Do your research about what the play is and is not and come in with an open mind.
Recognize that what you see on stage is meticulously staged. It’s choreographed. No piece of any of the staging—from intimacy to just general blocking—was created without the actors’ consent. They have been taken care of.
We have had a device-free rehearsal process. For the audiences too—we are locking their phones up in Yondr pouches during performances, so that there is no technology in the performance space. That’s to protect the students.
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Tickets for Equus can be purchased in person at the Center for Performing Arts Box Office on the campus of Illinois State University by calling (309) 438-2535 or online.
