"Equus" at The Production Company

It's been a long time since I felt the need -- the burning, burning NEED -- to post a new review for this blog, although I've seen a goodly amount of theater in Los Angeles in the last many months. But coming out of the year-old Production Company's production of Peter Shaffer's influential and highly theatrical play "Equus" I knew I had to say something because I could see what was going to be coming from the critics of Los Angeles and I wanted to give another perspective.

In short, this production, has everything it appears the majority of LA critics want to see in a play -- that is, a deep sense of its own importance, some clever gimmickry, and a naked boy (female nudity has never, in my experience, helped the reviews of bad shows here). Not to say that the show doesn't have more substantial things going for it, but to my mind not enough.

Let's start with the positives, assuming you all know the story of the psychiatrist bent on helping a DEEPLY troubled teenager who has blinded some horses. First and foremost, Jim Hanna's Dr. Dysart is superb. It is thoughtful, sensitive, deeply felt and absorbing performance, despite the fact that his fair-at-best English accent waivers consistently (more on this in a moment). There are some small holes that seem more the fault of the director, August Viverito. Why specifically, for example, is the doctor talking to the audience? Are we at a lecture? Are we in his head? Also, the arc of Hanna's character works well up to his final monologue, which feels like a sudden lurch of emotion for no solid reason, despite the "explanation" for it in the script. But, Viverito uses the tiny stage very cleverly much of the time, creating a number of locations simply and smartly.

Now, on to the shameful rest. The accent work varies from the pretty good to the seriously horrible -- this latter being the majority of the cast. Supposedly the cast had a dialect coach, which just makes me wonder what they were like before I saw them. (My biggest issue with this is unrelated to this specific show, but the ongoing problem that the critics of LA wouldn't know a good British accent if it served them tea and scones every fortnight; so, since no one in the theater community is being called out on bad accents, most of the dialect work in LA theatre is simply awful.)

Now, this glaring problem aside, the larger issue of the acting is also a mixed bag: other than Mr. Hanna, most of the cast is serviceable, but some of them are as wooden as the posts that make up the corners of the set pieces that stood in for stable beams. Worse, one of the least tolerable performances in my book was Patrick Stafford, who plays the mentally unstable young Alan Strang, around whom the story unfolds. Mr. Stafford speaks all of his lines in a tinny head-voice that makes him hard to understand, even in a room with only about 40 seats. Not helping this is his impossibly annoying habit of dropping off the last word from almost every sentence he utters. And again, on accents: his father seems to be Cockney, his mother educated London (okay so far), yet for some reason Mr. Stafford sounds like he's from way up North. This is akin to a person having a father from (randomly selected, here) rural Alabama, a mother from Connecticut, but somehow sounding like he's from Canada. In a culture where accents mean everything -- in a way that they just don't, here in the States -- this is a major issue that further adds to the ineffectiveness of the play's second lead. Is it the actor's fault or the show's dialect coach? The long and the short of all this is that since I could find no way to connect with the unbelievable actor, the character of poor Alan Strang seemed less sad and deeply troubled, and instead more merely psychotic and incurable; thus, ruining the stakes for me, the audience.

So, the score so far: this production of "Equus" has very, very mixed acting and terrible accent work, making the dense and wordy script hard to follow or care about.

But then the set spins at the "climax" of Act I, Mr. Stafford gets naked in Act II (yes, this is in the script), and this seems enough to have the LA critics hail it as a great show. And the thing is, I knew that this would be the case when I left the theater -- I could feel it, despite the hole in my stomach that opens up whenever I see less-than-acceptable art.

This production was less an evening of theater to me than it was a devious marvel of critical engineering.

Bottom Line: B-

Till next time!
HDSQ, Jr