Inspired by a real-life crime that Shaffer read about in a small town newspaper, Equus tells the story of a British psychiatrist wrestling with questions of passion and purpose while treating a disturbed teenaged boy who has violently attacked six horses.  And although this production stars Alec Baldwin as the psychiatrist, British newcomer Sam Underwood as his patient, and is directed by Theatre-Hall-of-Famer Tony Walton, the real star in the rehearsal room today is Mr. Shaffer himself, and the multi-award-winning opus he continues to polish.

Granted, there is nothing unusual about a playwright being in the rehearsal room. Authors of new plays frequently make changes during the period leading up to production. But once a play has been produced on Broadway, received multiple Tony Awards, been published, and then adapted into an Oscar-nominated film directed by Sidney Lumet, you might think the script was finished, “frozen,” as it were, as the definitive roadmap for any productions (and there have been many) to follow.  Not so here.

I am playing the role of the boy’s father in this production, and two days before rehearsals began, I received a whole new page of dialogue.  The new scene clarifies some of my character’s underlying motivation, and is of enormous help to me.  Other actors in our company have received equally significant adjustments to their scenes.  But what Shaffer is doing by picking up the pen at this stage in his, and the play’s, life, is not just a remarkable act of dedication to theatre, it is a profound act of courage.

Like the vibrant, restless horses that are so central to the play’s plot and theme, Equus the play is a magnificent  beast with a life all its own.  By re-entering the world of his play, Shaffer has summoned the courage to stand nose to nose with his creature and say: “I can do better.”

The young boy at the heart of the play has constructed a theology around horses – he literally worships them, and his actions call into question the psychiatrist’s own experience of faith and feelings about the passionate life.  “That boy has created out of his drab existence a passion more ardent than any I have known.”, says the Doctor. in one of the play’s more memorable moments.  “I feel a kind of envy.”  Why has this great playwright chosen to tempt the gods of theatre at this stage in his – and the play’s – life?  In fact, one can only imagine that the potential discoveries that might result from bringing thirty-five additional years’ perspective to the table would, for Shaffer, bring rewards worth the risk.

Win or lose, Shaffer’s willingness to continue exploring Equus is an inspiring lesson for us all… not just in the art of playwriting, but in the art of living. Would that we all had the courage to keep listening, within and without, to the narrative of our lives, remain open to its lessons, and be ready to continue re-writes.

Equus by Peter Shaffer
Directed by Tony Walton and Starring Alec Baldwin and Sam Underwood
June 8 through July 3, 2010
John Drew Theatre at Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY
For tickets and information call the box office at: 631-324-4050
Or go online to www.guildhall.org.

Regular Price: $400

Returning Students: $375

New Students Register BEFORE August 1: Special price $375

Enter your information below if you would like to register for Fall Acting Classes

And what a celebration it was!  From 2 o’clock in the afternoon until 10 last Saturday over 50 student performers and 300 or so undergrad, faculty and community audience gathered to celebrate the arrival of Spring and raise money for Hands for Haiti, a relief effort founded by local high school junior Dayna Troisi.  And it wasn’t just Southampton Undergrads onstage.  East End middle school fiction writers and high school poets of the MFA Program in Writing and Literature ‘s Young American Writers Project joined hands with undergrad musicians, dancers and vocalists, MFA playwrights and actors,  - an incredible sampling from throughout our community – all of them raising there collective voices in celebration of love and redemption, sex and joy, humor, sadness and despair…everything that art and youth has to say about life in hard times.

There were far to many inspiring moments from talented performers to single out, but the commitment and vision of the festival producer, Bill Burford, Stony Brook Southampton Dean of Students, as well as the hard work of his production team – a mix of students and professionals – deserves a shout out and salute.

What was intended to become an annual event had become a swan song.  But that is not the how this story ends.  The story is and will always be remembered as nothing less than triumph of art over adversity.  As Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass “I celebrate myself and sing myself… I sound my barbaric ‘yawp’ over the roofs of the world!”  Last Saturday, our young sounded their ‘yawp’ over the Shinnecock Hills, and it couldn’t have come at a better time for us all.

About 6 months ago, I received an e-mail from my good friend Reed Birney.   Reed is an accomplished, talented New York actor who works all the time, but you would never consider him a star. He is, however, universally adored by the New York Theatre Community… and in a widely distributed e-mail, he urged a vast network of friends and colleagues, to “act quickly!”  He was appearing in the American Premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Soho Rep and tickets were already flying out the door. Besides, the e-mail continued, “not only do you get to see me make my nude stage debut, but I’m sure that all of you want to see me brutally raped at gunpoint.”

Neither one, truthfully… but to celebrate my 54-year old friend’s courage to bare his bits on the boards AND to witness the rare opportunity to see a fully mounted production from the limited cannon of Sarah Kane, infant terrible of the London Theatre in the last glimmers of the 20^th Century, that was worth bucking my inertia and, as the e-mail advised, taking immediate action.

Blasted was Kane’s first play, begun when she was still a schoolgirl in Birmingham, UK. It premiered in 1995 at the Royal Court Theatre in London. The action of the play is set in a room of a luxurious hotel room in the north of England, where all seems normal – though there are vague references to a gathering menace in the streets below. Ian, played by Birney in this Soho Rep production that I am now hungry to see, seeks to reignite a dubious affair from the past with an emotionally disturbed innocent named Cate.  Ian bristles with gin-stoked rage when his expectations are not met, and a vicious cycle of abuse and brutality are leveled from both sides.  After the appearance of a starving machine-gun-toting soldier from some Baltic conflict, the narrative descends from a naturalistic though disturbing domestic scene into an increasingly nightmarish world of horrific vignettes, depicting anal rape, cannibalism and other shocking brutalities that largely enraged the British press at its premier.  The Daily Mail, in a review typical among the London dailies, referred to the play as a “disgusting feast of filth.” Blasted was, however, praised by many of Kane’s supporters as an important work, making important parallels between domestic violence and war, and between emotional and physical violence.

Had she not suffered from debilitating depression, Kane may have seen those critics eat their words.  She took her own life at 29 just two years after Blasted was first produced.

Now, it’s a cold Wednesday dusk, an hour before curtain, and I’m walking through what I remember from my salad days as a hell-hole south-of-Canal-Street neighborhood, now newly chic.  My  destination:  The venerable Soho Rep, where Blasted is playing, and, incidentally, where I  made my own New York acting debut, semi-clothed, in 1977.  I am walking along filled with magical thoughts, en route to the same theatre where my own professional career began, the same theatre where Sarah Kane was to have the American debut of her play, AND where my BBF Reed Birney was making his big-city-debut-de-naked butt.  I am loving life at this very moment, when out of this existential reverie appears an angel.  It’s Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman.

“Marsha!” I say.

“Stephen!” She replies. “What are you doing in my neighborhood?”

“I’m seeing this play at  Soho Rep.” says I.

A long pause, with concern beginning to color her face.  “Ohhh…” she keens, “I hear it’s a pretty rough go”

“So I’ve heard,” says I.

“Here’s what you do…” she says.  “Have a drink, a stiff one.”  (I’m thinking, no problem there!)  “And,” she continues, “purchase a bar of your favorite chocolate, and consume it quietly during the performance.  Good Luck!”  With that, she was gone.

I followed her instructions to the T.

The production did not disappoint.  It was exquisite, and to say the actors were good or even great doesn’t even begin to describe it. Their performances were convincing, accomplished, exciting, but more than that… they were brave.  Even under the artifice of theatre, to surrender yourself each evening to the lowest of the lower depths of human experience can take a toll on an actor’s psyche. It’s a balancing act of professional approach and artistic commitment. To be so convincing and yet come through the experience six nights, 8 times a week uncrushed by the weight of such darkness is a victory as glorious as any award.

As for me, the medication of one stiff drink quickly wore off as I was drawn into this dark world. But as I continued to follow the action down to below-hell depths, I found myself becoming more and more emotionally detached.  I could no sooner accompany the character to where they were headed than follow them to Mars.  Why would I want to?  I have my own demons to wrestle with, thank you very much.  But then, as I became more and more free from my emotions, my judgments began to soften – and my ideas about the action onstage became irrelevant.  Maybe it was the chocolate, but a curious change began to take place:  The more brutal, the more graphic and repellant the action became, the lighter I felt.  With each atrocity depicted with such care and craft by this extraordinary cast, director and production, I began to believe that I was being given a gift, an opportunity to exercise the darkest facets within my own psyche, the parts appearing only in my worst nightmares, and to allow this shadow to emerge safely.   After two hours of witnessing artful representation of mankind at its most depraved, I left the theatre not so afraid of the dark.

And, thanks to Marsha Norman, I had chocolate to share with my battle-scarred companions to the right and left… a communion.

Afterwards, over drinks with Reed at some Church Street dive, I asked what the experience of playing this role was like. He said that he’d never had such a liberating experience, onstage or off.  As strange as it sounds, I knew exactly what he meant.