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From the first page to the last, Equus did not disappoint. From Dora, (religious fanatic) to Alan, (equine lover/worshiper) this play had me both riveted and mildly disgusted at different parts in the play. What a ride, no pun intended! The Moustazza article, “A Jealous God: Ritual and Judgement in Shaffer’s Equus” does a great job of hitting on all the major issues presented in the play. Jealousy, ritual, and judgement, with these characters there is enough to go around.
ReplyDeleteThe play opens with Dysart,(Alan’s Psychiatrist) and that’s when we, the audience, realize that we have a psychological thriller on our hands. In short, Alan comes from a home that he shares with his parents, Dora and Frank. He has been indoctrinated to be a good and devout Christian by his mother and has relatively no relationship with his father, who happens to be an Atheist. In time we begin to see the full scope of the severity of Alan’s actions that have brought him to Dysart’s office. In fact, Alan has been performing strange, unnatural rituals with horses from stables where he works. It is plain to see that somewhere along the lines he gets his wires crossed and begins to weave his love of horses with his religious beliefs. It is those rituals that set off a series of events that will alter the lives of everyone involved.
In looking at Equus through the filter of jealousy, ritual, and judgement, I found that Alan had some deep seeded issues with his parents. Making the play more emotionally charged than the plays we have examined so far this semester. While the set is minimal the horse costumes worn by the actors added a whole other level of spectacle. I would argue that it is through perceived notions of judgement and jealousy that lead Alan to start engaging in these unhealthy rituals with horses, consequently leading him to blind the horses with a spike in a frenzy of madness. Now, Dysart is tasked with the unraveling of events leading up to the crime and begins questioning his own existence in the process. Dysart, to me played more of an antagonistic role at times rather than that of a healer. He was more envious and almost voyeuristic of Alan’s experiences and more and more displeased with his own. “I find that woman knitting, night after night- a woman I haven’t kissed in six years -and he stands in the dark for an hour, sucking on the sweat off his God’s hairy cheek!” (Moustazza, pp. 180) It is this belief that compels Dysart to keep digging for the harsher and harsher truths, all the while feeding his addiction.
Julietta Rivera
I most enjoyed Equus for the mere fact that it is rife with religious subtext and even some overt explorations of Judaeo-Christianity, as we see in the article by Mustazza. However, I definitely did it pick up on all the elements of those themes until I read the article itself. I of course noted how closely linked Alan’s “created myth”, as it’s described, was to a Christ-figure and later an Old Testament God. However, I didn’t pay that much mind to Dysart’s fascination to the Greek gods; I imagined it was simply a surface level counter perspective to that of Alan’s family. It was fascinating to read the extent to which this relationship actually delves, especially the “Nietzschean distinction between Dionysian impulse and Apollonian order.”. Allowing for Alan to now also serve as a an “alter-ego” to Dystart of sorts, multiple layers of subtext are added to the play and it’s dialogue. This would bring into question every aspect of Dysart’s methods of treatment when interacting with Alan. I would actually like to point out one specific moment that the article touches on briefly, when Dysart leads Alan to the conclusion that he wanted to look at Jill’s breasts. While I agree with the article that this exemplifies Dysart’s push for the Dionysian elements of Alan’s myth, which in reality may not exist, I would also argue that this makes Dysart an unreliable narrator of sorts. Dysart is dissatisfied with his profession on some level, he asks overtly leading questions (a bad practice in his field), and interprets Alan’s session through his own lens rather than creating a lens outside of himself for Alan. So, can truly accept all that Dysart says?
ReplyDeleteThis brings up an interesting point though, that is briefly mentioned by Hesther; perhaps Dysart is a new god to Alan. He is responsible for creating a new world view for Alan, bringing him into the Normal, and takes on a Christ-like role in the final pages by taking away the pain created by his false myth (the article describes this as well). Therefore, these leading questions lose their malintent and adopt a sense of a savior’s actions.
Joaquin Castillo
Equus was definitely one of the stranger plays we’ve read and the Freudian religious themes are pretty blatant. That said, I feel like a big part of that has to do with so much of the story being from Dysart’s point of view. He’s a psychiatrist facing a stagnating life. He’s so self-absorbed that he couldn’t possibly take care of another human being, let alone one who has suffered extensive trauma and social starvation. As Mustazza points out, despite the Christian origins of Alan’s psychosis Dysart can only recognize his own short comings and longings for a grander life. Dysart is a classic Freudian adherent, and by the seventies many of Freud’s ideas were already under fire. Dysart seems to be searching for specific triggers for Alan that he expects to be present, rather than observing the events that take place to seek a problem. By the end of the play it is evident that he has no desire to cure his patient’s delusions and, as noted in the article, hopes to vicariously partake in Alan’s horse based madness. It seems that being sexually deprived has resulted in his sexual depravity. He has a young man go through a traumatic event, not so that he can try to address the issues therein, but to sexually gratify himself due to his own shortcomings. This is incredibly unethical considering the position of power he holds in their relationship, but reflects how far gone Dysart is himself. He eventually relents as we see in the end.
ReplyDeleteEnrique Perez
Leonard Mustazza describes in "A Jealous God: Ritual and Judgement" that Martin Dysart learns about Alan Stang by speaking with his parents, creating large amounts of evidence that his upbringing did have a large effect on who he is. I honestly agree with the belief that it is often near impossible to figure out where a severe mental illness in a person come from. In real-life, people want to say "it's the parent's fault." Looking at a very serious topic, people who commit devastating tragedies, such as shootings create shock not in only in just the ones whom are affected, but in their own families. Many parents of people who commit these tragedies are just as shocked and hurt as the victim's families. In some cases, the parents or family members may blame themselves. In other cases, it surprises them because they are completely unaware of the "darker side" of their children or family members. I feel it's completely unfair to just throw the blame on those who had no participation or awareness of the crime. But this is just the way humans are. They always want find someone to blame, even if it's the reasoning makes little to no sense. They never consider that reasoning may have risen solely from the persons who committed the act.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of Alan Stang, there definitely seems to be some emotional struggles that have risen because of his parents, particularly his non-religious father. When it comes to emotional trauma as a child, it can be quite unpredictable about where it can lead. In many cases, very serious consequences can occur if said child is not given the proper help.
Michael McCormick
Of all the plays studied so far, Equus has to be one of my favorite plays so far. I enjoyed the psychological aspects along with the dark, religious subtext of the play. r
ReplyDeleteOf all the characters Alan Strang was the one that intrigued me the most. His condition, along with Dysart internal conflict, was the driving force of the story. I found it a bizarre situation. On one hand, it is clear that his condition takes on some of the influence of his religious mother and stern, socialist father. But on the other hand, nothing really struck me as the parents being particularly unloving or neglectful, if not a bit strict. I find it hard to believe that they had everything to do with Alan’s condition. Mustazza mentions in his article that Alan perhaps felt compelled to take it upon himself to blame himself for the thrift between his mother and father. Alan felt that he was the cause of it, as their conflicting ideologies often clashed every time, he was subject to the conversation in regards of bringing him up. And while that very well may be the case as well as the playwright’s intentions, I saw it differently.
To me, Alan seemed to have wrestled with these conflicting ideologies all of his life, not knowing how to balance either-or live-in harmony with them, unable to decide for himself what to believe. He supposedly doesn’t know how to read or write (either he is a slow learner, or he just never went to school. In fact, I don’t recall Alan’s education ever being brought up. He is seventeen years old, so he should be in high school right now. Did he go to school? Was he homeschooled?), he was stuck in a job he didn’t want, and when presented to work with the objects of his fascination it leads me to believe the best way he could cope was by making his own ideology that somehow became coalescent with both ideologies he was brought up with (particularly with religion while exploring sensuality and sexuality in a way that was safe and away from the judging eyes of his father. Just him and his makeshift god.
Mirella Martinez
Equus is interesting due to its complex relationship between Dysart and Alan’s influence over him. The article explains the battle between “Dionysian impulse and Apollonian order” which is shown through Alan and Dysart. Alan can be seen to be the Dionysian impulse while Dysart is the other. Although Dysart is meant to influence Alan to become “normal,” Alan further influences Dysart.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Dysart focuses on Alan, the play is about Dysart due to Alan’s effect on him and realizations because of him. At the end of the play, Alan’s fate can be seen to be left ambiguous due to its focus on Dysart and his broken belief system. His beginning words are “You see, I’m lost” and let the audience know he is unsure of what normality and who is better off at the end of the play. Dysart claims to be jealous of Alan. He thinks Alan is better off without his help due to how “Passion … can be destroyed by a doctor,” but “It cannot be created (Shaffer 99).” Furthermore, Dysart states at the beginning, he is desperate, and, “wearing that horse’s head [himself]. … reined up in old language and old assumption” (8). After working with Alan, Dysart grows to see he is stuck in his ways and Alan is freer and more passionate than him. Unlike Alan, Dysart is limited “because [his] educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle” (8). Due to Dysart’s beliefs about living proper and normal, he realizes he is living in a boring and passionless marriage and life. Dysart realizes he can only envy Alan’s intense devotion to Equus.
The comparison is best shown in the lines, “I watch that woman knitting, night after night, a woman I haven’t kissed in six years- and he stands in the dark for an hour sucking the sweat off his God’s hairy cheek!” Dysart is shown as stuck in a boring marriage without physical or emotionally intimacy. Alan, on the other hand, is shown as extremely devoted and connected to a horse he cannot even communicate with and stares into its eyes for hours. At the end, Dysart questions his career’s value because he is unsure whether he wants to make Alan live in the same boring, loveless and passionless life Dysart has.
-Zugay Trevino
Alan as a character strikes me as odd, and, as mentioned by Mirella, Shaffer fails to provide any salient information about his educational background apart from his being unable to read well. Frank as a father, who hypocritically loathes television yet is caught at the cinema, doesn’t seem to care about this fact enough to remedy it. Dysart comments on Alan’s strange isolation from society: “He’s a modern citizen for whom society doesn’t exist” And now we have these binaries in the form of normal “sanity”/divine “madness”, uninspired living/ delusional transcendence, atheism/ theism, rational society/ irrational fantasy – for lack of better oppositional terms. I tend to reject oppositional binary thought, as Beauvoir writes in her book The Second Sex, “alterity is the fundamental category of human thought” and we should resist them lest we fall into false dichotomous thinking. By alterity she means otherness of two, which she applies to genders; however, I apply this to most binary thinking. In this play, Shaffer seems to reject any notion of being in the world apart from ecstatic transcendence or uninspired living. Alan, originally failed by his parents, who contentedly allow him to live in social and mental exile, and who also represent the aforementioned binaries of the play, then finds comfort in repenting his sins to Dysart after rejection by his all-seeing Equus. Characters who I’d like to understand more of would be of course, the only sensible women of the play: Hesther and Jill. I sensed a more romantic relationship between Hesther and Dysart and I hope Shaffer didn’t include these two women just to contrast and highlight the troubles of their men counterparts.
ReplyDelete-Linda Gonzalez
While reading the play I found similarities between Alan and Dysart. At times i thought Alan was the doctor and Dysart was the patient. In the article,” A Jealous God: Ritual and Judgement in Shaffer’s Equus”, Leonard Mustazza talks about how not only Alan had psychological problems but the Dysart did as well. Mustazza points out that, “ “Dysart should regard the difference between himself and Ala in this way is not in the least surprising. After all, the play is concerned not only with Alan Strang’s madness but also with Dysart’s deep discontents, notably his longings to escape from the “normal” to experience the kind of transcendence that Alan has know to live his own passion for ancient Greece.”(175) Dysart mentions to his colleague Hesther, “but that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something. I envy it.” (73) I found that Alan at times gave the doctor a taste of his medicine by flipping Dysart’s treatment procedures back at him. Dysart would bombard Alan with questions and at the same time Alan would ask the doctor the same questions. Dysart had crazy dreams like Alan, “It’s that lad of yours who started it off. Do you know it’s his face I saw on every victim across the stone” (16) Dysart had a dream of his passion but Alan was in it too. The doctor wants what Alan has, and even advises Alan to runaway at the end of the play. Even Alan is having more of a sex life than Dysart, the doctor sounded like he was getting aroused when Alan was acting out the intimate scene with Jill. I like how in the play when a memory/flashback would ensue, Alan would act it out. I found that clever when it comes to trying to use a memory in a play. There was also the scenes where Dysart listened to a tape recording of Alan. While listening, Alan stood behind Dysart and read the letter out loud.
ReplyDeleteDanny Olivarez
For starters, when I was reading Equus, it sort of reminded me of when I was reading Death of a Salesman and how there is a usage of “scene-within-a-scene” moments that Willy goes through similar to how Alan is speaking to Dysart. It seems that both of these works utilize the usage of memories to give more insight on these characters. However, one different is that Death of a Salesman is split into two fairly sized acts, while Equus is also split off into two acts, however, there are many scenes within them. Maybe, this is to give off the impression of fragmented or shattered memories that are trying to connect to one another to paint a bigger picture for the audience. Furthermore, these two works are an experience in themselves when reading it and not seeing it.
ReplyDeleteIn regard to the article by Leonard Mustazza, it’s interesting how the comparison between Apollo and Dionysus is made, within the play itself, there are mentions of Greek aspects. This is more specifically when Dysart speaks with Hesther about how his wife and him will sit at their household and he would view books while she knits clothes for the orphans. Even Dysart’s name is unique compared to the other characters. In my opinion, the name itself sounds like it reigns from Greek mythology or something similar of the sorts. Anyways, on the surface, or on a first read through, we can see that Dysart is the primary source for Alan’s healing. However, it seems to be that both Alan and Dysart have these “secrets” or “demons” that both are battling.
Furthermore, to exemplify the relationship between the “healer” and the “wounded”, the interaction between Dysart and Alan is a resemblance of a priest and a sinner. For example, the tape recorder that Dysart gives to Alan can be seen as an uncanny reference to confession in Catholicism or Christianity. In confession, you do not ever see the eyes of the priest who is listening to your sins or problems, instead you are on the other side of the barrier talking to an anonymous figure. This is similar to the play because Dysart tells Alan that he doesn’t have to tell him his secrets to his face, instead he can just speak to the recorder.
In addition, I thought the “truth-telling” pills can be seen as sacramental bread or something of the sorts, or it could be that Dysart is selling his word as truth similar to a priest giving his sermon because during the scene, the audience can see that Alan is somewhat desperate to fix what is wrong with him. So, he as a sinner, is willing to accept the religion that Dysart is willing to give him, which is found in the pills. A social commentary can be built on this and how religion can be perceived as a lie and it is sold as an answer to someone’s issues.
P.J.
P.J. Hernandez
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