|
Beating a Dead HorseCircuit Playhouse’s Equus never gallops.by Chris Davis & Hadley Hury
Ragland has furthermore decided that she might be more insightful than playwright Shaffer. She has moved the play from its specified location in southern England (pretty important considering that Alan is obsessed with the genealogies of both horses and kings of England) and set it blandly in a generic America. She also changed chunks of dialogue to suit her imagined needs. “Spanish Fly” (an aphrodisiac mythically purported to make a girl so hot and bothered she will impale herself on a gearshift) was changed to “LSD.” While there have been claims that LSD enhances the sexual experience, it lacks the specified purpose of Shaffer’s original. Furthermore, by Equus’ premiere LSD had been old news for a decade and if Shaffer had wanted to say LSD he certainly would have. The telling TV jingles sung by the troubled boy have also been updated because, as Ragland says, “Nobody knew them.” One of the jingles that apparently noone knows goes like this, “Double your pleasure, double your fun …” What man with glands can forget those voluptuous blonde twins rollerskating to the tune of that famous (and still in use) campaign for Doublemint Gum? It has been and will be the stuff of many an adolescent male fantasy, and is a more potent choice than Ragland’s meaningless substitution of “Break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat Bar.” And lest anyone be tripped up by those wacky Brit euphemisms, Ragland has changed “pricks” to “dicks.” As psychiatrist Martin Dysart, Stone races through the lines that he (kinda-sorta) knows so quickly, and with such lack of attention to meaning, purpose, or desire that it is impossible to tell what he is saying. When he does slow down it generally indicates that he has lost his way and is about to stop altogether and wait for a fellow actor to bail him out. At moments he looks to be terrified, and it appears that his one goal on-stage is to remember what comes next. With Stone so cut off from the world of the play and incapable of making any character choices – let alone committing to them – it is easy to forgive the rest of the cast if their performances seem somewhat shallow. Without the give and take of energy and idea there can be no dramatic growth, thus the production slouches toward amorphousness. It is painful to watch as good an actress as Jo Lynn Palmer flail aimlessly before Stone’s dead-eyed stare. Palmer tries to create a connection, or at least facilitate some kind of action, but without a partner to share the scene with she becomes an affected town crier sawing the air with her hands. As Alan Strang, the 17-year-old boy who blinded six horses, Sean Bryan risks nothing, substituting attitude for emotion as he blinks at the audience, or glowers at the other actors. When he sings the television jingles (Strang’s mode of communication for the first third of the play) it’s more like an audition for a musical than an attempt to either communicate his pain or hide from it. Bryan finds a little life toward the end of the play when Alan’s father (Jim Ostrander), catches him attending a pornographic film with fellow stable worker Jill Mason (Courtney Oliver). Much of the scene’s success, however, can be credited to Oliver and Ostrander, who have created the most fully realized characters in the entire production. The remaining characters disappear into the colorless goulash and the poor horses, sexless and earthbound, do little to advance the action. In this uneven and often misguided production only Jason J. McDaniel’s wonderful set stands out for its stark simplicity and mere service to a wonderful script. – Chris Davis Equus , Through August 9th Circuit Playhouse Anton ChekHov’s The Seagull is on view at the McCoy Theatre of Rhodes College through July 26th. The production of the classic tragicomedy features a new version of the text by Tom Stoppard and is an offering of the Third Annual Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival. (Williams wrote that Chekhov influenced him more than any other writer, although that is certainly a perspective shared by many, if not most, other stage geniuses of our century: Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, and Stephen Sondheim, among others, have remarked on their inspiration.) Indeed, one of the greatest satisfactions in watching Chekhov’s plays is that they retroactively mirror so many glimpses of our modern masters. Clearly directed by Bennett Wood and acted well, this production of The Seagull serves as a reminder for Memphis audiences of the hugely informing spirit of Chekhov, a man who always considered himself primarily a physician and who, having just produced The Seagull, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, and The Cherry Orchard, died at age 44, in the arc of his greatness. The play is set on a lakeside country estate south of Moscow at the turn of the century but, like all of Chekhov, the play is actually set in the universalities of the human heart. The power of these dramas lies in the tension between the irresolution of their plots and the sad but rigorous compassion of the author. With commingled ironic humor and infinitely sympathetic gentleness, he stands his characters against the blank enormity of the Russian landscape and along the great divides of human experience, one foot each in aspiration and regret, love and isolation, moral courage and self-loathing cowardice, generosity and selfishness. The Seagull may be considered the least of Chekhov’s great quartet of classics, but the relativity of such an assessment pales beside the work’s display of his characteristic genius for subtly (and, even more uncanny, simultaneously) developed pathos and comedy. The Seagull is a rondelet of human folly, involving Arkadina, an actress skirmishing with advancing years; her struggling writer son, Konstantin; a young actress, Nina, whom Constantin loves unrequitedly; Arkadina’s loosely attached lover, a famous writer, Trigorin; and Masha, a woman who quietly implodes under the weight of an unvoiced love combined with confounding boredom and quantities of vodka. No one in the play gets what he or she wants, and the ones who end up keeping what they had to begin with have done so not by deserving but by cleverness or compromise. Then why do we laugh so much? Because Chekhov was, first and foremost, a practical and kindhearted doctor. He knew what the human condition calls for. One of the brightest presences in this production is Cy Carter as the young, hyper-sensitive Konstantin. He has real stage presence and a genuine spiritedness that keeps the character’s myopic self-dramatizing, which he mistakes for artistic idealism, from altogether obliterating audience sympathy. Kim Justis, although not ideally cast as Nina, rises remarkably to the occasion of her final aria about the dangerous borderlands of art and life; and Margaret Wakeman Peacock is arresting as the long-suffering Polina. Tony Isbell is not fortuitously cast as Trigorin; the character’s effete self-absorption and ironic, self-referential moralizing don’t allow Isbell the freedom for flat-out drama and more energetically wry comedy that have enlivened his best performances. There is not consistently in the McCoy staging the sense of ensemble that makes Chekhov sing, and towards the end of the second act there are wobbles in both pacing and tone; at certain crucial moments the lovely costumes by David Jilg become more focal than the dialogue. On the whole, however, it’s an intelligent – and, as important, sweet – interpretation. Stoppard’s infusions to the script as we traditionally know it are discreet and for the most part, helpful, clarifying for contemporary audiences without taking rash liberties. The role of Dorn the local physician, in Stoppard’s treatment, becomes at once lighter and more ironic; and Hugh Sinclair’s performance etches him as the carefully distanced observer whose down-to-earth empiricism distinguishes him from the human comedy that swirls around him. The other character whom Stoppard evinces with a faithful but
fresh take is Masha, who is “in mourning for her life” and who,
with only slight tweakings and in the neatly balanced performance
of M. Michele Somers, may come close to the hilariously heartbreaking
prototype of the Moscow Art Theatre’s production exactly 100 years
ago. As Konstantin’s mother the actress, whose indifferent maternal
skills contrast sharply with the fiercely concentrated constancy
of her life-as-performance, Christina Wellford Scott (looking
appropriately Pre-Raphaelite in a dark red wig) is a droll Arkadina.
The big seduction scene, in which she goes all out to prevent
Trigorin abandoning her, is masterful. Simultaneously juggling
the melodramatic artifice of Arkadina’s 19th-century acting style,
contemporary slyness, and real, no-holds-barred emotion, Scott
plays the audience’s expectations at least as well as she does
her lover’s. Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival, Through July 26th, Rhodes’ McCoy Theatre |
eter Shaffer’s drama Equus – about an adolescent boy who violently
blinded six horses, and his psychiatrist who fears that to cure
the boy he must perform spiritual euthanasia – has been staggering
audiences and critics alike since its 1973 premier. Shaffer picked
up where the German Expressionists left off in his exploration
of those bleak and brutal mental regions 
– Hadley Hury