Redtwist Theatre > Equus 2010 > Press Release > Show Photos > Reviews

Highly Recommended-Short List	Preview	Recommended "The extremity is the point"	Highly Recommended "deeply satisfying experience"
Recommended "wonderful, fully truthful work"	Review	chicagotribune.com — A new staging of Equus has the emotional truth to make it worth watching	searing production
"Brilliant"	Blog: Worth The Price of Admission? "Yes"	Highly Recommended psychological thriller (English version of foreign language translation on 7DAYS)	the action shakes us

At a rehearsal last week for Redtwist Theatre’s new production of Equus, actor Andrew Jessop leans too heavily on a piece of the under-construction set, which gives way, sending a wooden beam flying. “Who built that?” Jessop asks indignantly, to great laughs from cast and crew—who know Jessop is serving triple duty as scenic designer and chief carpenter.

At this all-hands-on-deck Edgewater storefront, it’s not unusual to find artistic director Michael Colucci working box office or his wife, Redtwist media director Jan Ellen Graves, onstage.

Founded by actor-director Colucci in 1994 as the Actors Workshop Theatre, the company produced sporadically and itinerantly until moving into its current space on Bryn Mawr Avenue in 2003, where it’s produced full seasons of 20th-century standards by the likes of Arthur Miller and Edward Albee and original plays such as company member Tommy Lee Johnston’s Aura, which earned a Jeff nomination for new work this season. In 2008, the company rebranded as the more distinctive Redtwist Theatre, a name reflected in the company’s shorthand mission statement: “To do white hot drama, in a tiny black box, with a little red twist.”

The theater first produced Equus, Peter Shaffer’s 1973 psychological drama about a troubled boy with a horse fetish and the psychiatrist trying to solve him, in March 2007. It was a major hit, extending four times and earning five Jeff nominations, winning one for actor Peter Oyloe. For the current season, Redtwist announced a remount of that production, with Oyloe; it was slated to open in March. But then The Pillowman happened.

Director Kimberly Senior’s production of Martin McDonagh’s darkly comic 2003 work starred Jessop as the writer Katurian and Oyloe as his mentally impaired brother Michal, both accused of a spate of child murders. While Redtwist most often had used its long, narrow storefront in a faux-proscenium style, with a stage at one end separated from the audience, Senior and designers Anders Jacobson and Judy Radovsky created an alley configuration that put the audience in the midst of the play’s harrowing action.

Pillowman opened November 21, 2009, for an intended five-week run; stellar reviews and audience demand led Redtwist to scuttle most of its remaining season, including Miller’s Incident at Vichy, Simon Moore’s adaptation of Misery and what would have been the U.S. premiere of young British playwright Polly Stenham’s That Face, to keep Pillowman open. (In addition, rights issues developed with both That Face, which Manhattan Theatre Club snagged, and Misery, which Graves says has been pulled from the market by Stephen King.)

“When Pillowman came together, I think our mission became crystallized with the design of the show and the success of the show,” Colucci, 57, says in a pre-rehearsal conversation in the theater’s lobby. Graves, 56, finishes the thought: “To close the gap between the audience and the actors, to integrate them rather than separate them,” an approach they’ll apply to both design aesthetic and choice of material.

Once the company finally set a May 2010 closing date for Pillowman, it slotted Equus to follow—Graves says that was the show of the previously announced slate about which Redtwist’s patrons had voiced the most anticipation. But the uncertain scheduling cost them Oyloe, whose role in TUTA’s Baal conflicted.

Jessop stepped in, and Colucci says they decided to stop thinking of it as a remount, staging an entirely new production scaled to their new, intimate mission. In rehearsal, this Equus indeed feels very different from the 2007 edition; Jessop has reoriented the space into a shallow three-quarter thrust that puts the audience in breathing distance from the cast. Colucci says Redtwist may adopt its newfound energy as a slogan: “Namely, ‘Inches Away.’”

It's been just three years since Redtwist Theatre (then called Actors Workshop Theatre) last staged Peter Shaffer's 1973 psychological drama about Alan Strang, a teenager with a mystical, BDSM-tinged fascination for horses, and his therapist who talks a lot. But this isn't a remount. Where the earlier production honed in on the script's erotic elements, this one focuses on its preoccupation with spirituality. So much so, in fact, that it looks and feels like a pagan ritual. The result is a little overheated, but also eerie and mesmerizing--particularly the unsettling performance by Andrew Jessop, who plays Alan as an unpredictable, raw-eyed fanatic. Redtwist's first Equus may've been sexier, but this one is certainly scarier.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Reviewed by Fabrizio O. Almeida

Redtwist Theatre has revived Peter Shaffer’s venerable “Equus,” but this 2010 revival is not to be confused with the company’s 2007 revival. In a full-length program note, Artistic Director Michael Colucci, who directs this “Equus,” goes into great detail about the differences between the two productions—from cast and crew to design changes. What this communicates to me—besides the fact that Colucci really, really, really likes this play—is that he and his collaborators have tremendous belief in what they can bring to it.  This is a refreshingly bold artistic statement if ever there was one. But it is one Colucci and his collaborators have earned the right to make, for this “Equus” is a very good production of a very good play. It’s not without its challenges, but overall this is an absorbing, arresting and intelligent staging.

“Equus” tells the tale of a middle-aged psychiatrist’s (Dr. Martin Dysart) search for the reasoning behind a 17-year-old boy’s (Alan Strang) mutilation of six horses with a metal spike to their eyes. Dysart narrates a good bulk of the play directly to the audience, but much of the action is reenacted as flashback, or dramatizes the psychoanalytical sessions between temperate doctor and tempestuous patient. As Dysart probes Alan’s past, an unhappy childhood is fast uncovered, as are clashing parental units: a sexually repressed, voyeuristic and atheist father; a religious fanatic of a mother who may have unconsciously enabled the slow warp of her son’s childhood love of horses from strange obsession to unhealthy messianic devotion. But “Equus” is equally the story of Dysart, a man experiencing a mid-life crisis and who has come to resent his successful career and sexless marriage. If half the play’s driving tension is in its glorious build-up to the motivating incident leading to Alan’s blinding of the horses (I won’t give anything away here, but suffice it to say that as written by Shaffer and staged by Colucci, it’s well worth the two-and-a-half-hour wait), then the other half is psychological and concerns Dysart’s mental struggle between admiration and resentment for Alan, a boy whose deplorable actions represent the victory of passion over restraint, of instinct over reason and, I don’t think it would be a stretch to say, of life over death.  Who would you rather be, the bon vivant (Alan) or the fuddy duddy (Dysart)? Quite simply, this is the question “Equus” posits to an audience throughout half its time being a mystery-puzzle play, and the other half appropriating a garrulous psycho-babble dissertation. Never mind Shaffer’s dense monologues or elitist references to everything from Greek mythology to religious iconography, “Equus” boils down to whether you would prefer your life be free and unbridled, or to appear like something on Ritalin.

It’s a specious argument, of course, because you can’t ignore the crime, and in allowing an audience to identify with Alan for much of the play—Dysart is such a repressed and condescending character that it’s virtually impossible to want to identify with him—“Equus” becomes a dramatic piece of sleight-of hand manipulation. It’s also, ultimately, intellectually dishonest. Who doesn’t, metaphorically speaking, want to throw caution to the wind and run away with the circus, especially if like Dysart one reaches the point in one’s life where maturity, complacency and familiarity have sucked the passion out of certain things in life? Perhaps in 1973, when the play was first performed in England, it was possible to see Alan’s crime—a melodramatic and obvious metaphor if ever there was one—as a stand-in for the unapologetic and subversive actions by certain persecuted or misunderstood minorities (homosexuals, the mentally ill).  Today, however, the play could be dangerously read as a condemnation of the psychological treatment of modern-day “passions” problematic to today’s societal norms—pedophilia, bestiality and other types of psychiatric disorders—“obsessions” whose psychiatric suppression is paramount to the end of the “individual.”

Redtwist Theatre’s aggressively intimate space means that the audience can hear and cling to every subversive line in the play. In fact, the performing area is so surprisingly constrictive that many times the performers can do little but stand and deliver their lines, a storefront handicap that works well for a Shaffer play in which language dazzles as brightly as the debatable ideas. As Alan, Andrew Jessop is the dramatic anchor of this production.  His boyish good looks, aquiline nose and fair complexion make for a physical tabula rasa against which a complex and deeply layered psychological performance makes all the more of an impression. Jan Ellen Graves, in a supporting role as a Dysart confidante, has a magnificently austere look to her face that adds to the play’s wintry tone. And as a young yet precocious girl who sets her eyes on Alan and sets off a chain of disastrous events, the utterly captivating Holly Bittinger, with her piercing blue eyes, gamine frame and defiantly punkish attitude, reminds me of a young Martha Plimpton.

Redtwist’s production is a deeply satisfying experience, and reminds one of why this highly debatable and subversive play has lasted for nearly forty years.

Redtwist Theatre’s re-conceived and re-staged production of their 2007 hit production of Equus features a three quarter thrust stage, new background music and many new players. The result is a different experience as this Equus is dominated by the wonderful fully truthful work by Brian Parry who gives Dr. Martin Dysart a most hauntingly compelling turn. As in some productions of Equus, the character of Dysart can loom large when the actor playing the distraught psychologist is strong. That is the cast here as the intimate thrust staging puts Dysart literally in the audience’s face while Alan is shuttered to an obscure place on the stage for much of the show.

Equus is the story of why a 17 year old boy would pluck the eyes out of horses entrusted to him. Equus is a psychological drama, a mystery that pits the veteran psychologist in a battle for the soul of the disturbed boy. Alan (Andrew Jessop) has so much mixed up passion and pain conflicting him that he acts out as his religious-sexual urges become distorted in the eyes and manner of horses. Since Jessop plays Alan as an internally conflicted soul confused by his own actions, Dysart emerges as the character in desperate search of his own worship so that he can experience his own pain in order to gain passion in his life. Kudos to Brian Parry for such a deeply intense and thoroughly nuanced performance.

The 2010 Redtwist Theatre production of Equus is serviceable with moments of truth but the interplay between Alan and Dysart lacks those magical mystical connections that raises Equus to the level of high drama. Brian Parry’s performance alone is reason enough to this show.

Funny, for a play as muddle-headed as Peter Shaffer's "Equus," I have yet to see a production that fails to elevate the 1973 drama's idiotic postulations into something worth watching. And so it goes with Redtwist Theatre's revival, which is just stylized and grounded enough in emotional truth to work.

This is Redtwist's second go with the material (the first was a 2007 staging), but the current version is entirely rethought. As was the case with the company's recent, long-running hit "The Pillowman," the audience is seated almost on top of the action. Once again Redtwist is doing something interesting with the constraints of its cramped, narrow space — limitations that artistic director Michael Colucci seems committed to using to his advantage going forward.

This kind of extreme intimacy isn't for all audiences — or all actors, for that matter. "Equus" (about a working-class British teen who gouges the eyes of stabled horses in a fit of psychosexual-religious fervor) includes a famous nude scene, and you have to ask yourself just how comfortable you are being that close. To quote the play, "The extremity is the point."

You also have to tolerate Shaffer's stupendously silly assertion that life is an either-or proposition — that you either gallop with the crazies or live the tepid life of the well-adjusted. But Colucci and his cast treat it all with the utmost seriousness (and the occasional wry acknowledgement of comedy), and as a whole the show is as good as this sort of thing gets.

Not sure I agree with the use of American accents, but the acting itself is very good — the kind of committed performances that are Chicago's bread and butter. Scott Butler, in fetish gear, plays the horse Nugget with real attention to detail, and as the intense boy at the story's center, Andrew Jessop (who doubles as the set designer, creating a dark environment of paddocks) offers himself as a compelling mystery to his shrink (all tweeded up, Brian Parry is terrific). It's essentially a detective story dressed up in psychobabble, but you can't say it's not entertaining.

"the action shakes us"