Chills up your spine

Psychologist Martin Dysart’s ugly case of what he calls “professional menopause” first crops up when he admits 17-year-old Alan Strang into his stark, dimly lit office. When the psychologist greets his new patient, Alan acknowledges Dysart’s extended hand with a blank, stultified stare, broken only by strident outbursts of advertising jingles—"Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint gum.” Something about the boy creeps out even Dysart, a seasoned child psychologist.

Widow’s Web Theatre Company’s Equus is billed as a psychological thriller. While the promise of spine-tingling twists made me raise a skeptical eyebrow—it’s no minor feat for a small theater company working with the most minimalist of sets to pull off psychological thrills—Equus left me with the same sort of feeling I had after first watching David Fincher’s Seven.

Set in a psychiatric hospital in England, this dark tale of a troubled psychologist (Dave Beck) and his young, disturbed patient (David Richards, who also co-directed with Tom Plunkett) begins when Dysart’s attorney friend asks for a favor: to treat a young client of hers, a boy who committed an act of animal abuse so heinous that the court was ready to lock him up for life. Dysart reluctantly agrees, and so begins a series of tense treatment sessions in which the details of one chilling night at a horse stable are slowly revealed.

Written in the 1970s by Peter Shaffer, the same guy who brought us Amadeus, Equus addresses themes of professional crises, mental illness and misdirected religious fervor with considerable gustiness. Throughout the course of the play, we learn that Alan has turned his childhood obsession with Christ imagery into an unholy veneration of horses. For Alan, God has been made flesh through a creature he calls Equus—the Latin word for horse. If this isn’t bizarre enough, psychologist Dysart, trapped in a frigid marriage and frustrating career, finds himself growing jealous of the unabashed vigor with which Alan worships his equine idol. As Dysart muses, “Without worship, we shrink.”

Beck’s performance as Dysart is understated and believable, which allows Richards’ Alan to stand out as all the more creepy and noisome. The supporting cast, particularly Tom Plunkett as Alan’s rigid, atheistic lower-class father, is solid. The set is beautifully simple—nothing but a rectangular wooden floor with benches. When the five “horses"—actors wearing enormous platform shoes—ritualistically don their horse head-shaped wire masks and clomp onto the stage under a thin, eerie light, it’s enough to send shivers down my back.

My only quarrels with the play have to do with the script itself, which left me with a somewhat unwelcome aftertaste. I’m a fan of dark, unsettling productions if the ideas they convey are gripping and thought provoking. For me, however, themes of professional dissatisfaction, mid-life yearning and teenagers forming strange, one-man cults have been somewhat overdone. The script feels a bit dated—probably timely in the 1970s, when psychological weirdness and mid-life crises were en vogue, but less fresh on today’s stage.

Nevertheless, Widow’s Web’s Equus is a captivating play, a play in which the actors, especially Richards, delve passionately into their roles, unafraid of making themselves completely vulnerable. It’s a pleasurably disturbing thing to watch.