I am in complete sympathy with the actor about not feeling up to par against Richard Burton when it comes to speaking the poetic language in Equus.  If you don’t feel you have the resonant, deep voice that Burton possesses, or the hypnotic charm of Anthony Hopkins’ tenor, feeling inadequate is completely understandable.

Ignoring that aspect of the writing this early in rehearsals isn’t really a problem.  Going for the emotional connection to the material is the primary concern when you first pick up a script.  Getting to know who your character is and why he responds to his circumstances as he does is more important than the language that he uses.

There is plenty of time to give close attention to the nature of the language later in the rehearsal period.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that you should entirely ignore it up front.  My own inclination when I deal with poetic plays is to pay attention to the language for its own sake first, for a single reading.  To say the words out loud, to feel them in my mouth, to hear the sounds mingle, to let the images they create rise up before me.

I don’t read much poetry.  It’s not my thing.  But poetic prose grabs my attention.  There is an element in it that doesn’t exist in non-poetic prose and which cannot be separated from the meaning of the words.  They are entwined.

What is poetic prose?  It’s when a character speaks in a way that people don’t ordinarily.  Newspapers write to an eighth grade education level, and most of us use that same vocabulary in everyday speech.  But poetic language is different.  It uses words and phrases like “embrace”, “straining to jump clean-hoofed”, and “one more dented little face”.  When was the last time you spoke like that?

There is a reason why Burton and Hopkins have played this role.  They are unafraid of poetic language.  They are happy to savor it, to lay it out for your inspection.  They understand its power.  It is subtext on steroids.

Their success lies not so much in their vocal instrument as it is does in their appreciation of the power of language and their willingness to let the words work their magic.  That is something you are capable of doing, as well, no matter what sort of voice you have.

Part of the key to understanding Dysart involves throwing yourself into the language.  You may not reach a full appreciation of it until deep into rehearsals, but you need to deal with its impact on the play well before then.  You can’t separate out the fact without the feel that goes along with it.  Shaffer’s later works are ALL poetic in nature.  It is part of who he is as a playwright.

No, you shouldn’t try to imitate Richard Burton’s way of wrapping his voice around words.  But you do have to find your own way of entering them and letting them wash over your tongue.

Poetry is dense.  It takes a while to uncover its mysteries.  Understanding poetry is work for the subconscious.  You must revisit it, over and over, out loud – not silently, in your head, for poetry is meant to be spoken – in order to let your subconscious infiltrate it and unwrap its meaning.

But apart from that – to refer back to what I wrote last time – Shaffer begins both acts with the same eight words:  “With one particular horse, called Nugget, he embraces.”  It begs the question, “Why?”

Not having worked on the play, I don’t have the answer to that, and in any case, my answer might not be yours.  But it’s a question I would ask myself at the start of rehearsals.  I would revisit it every day until I had the answer.  Playwrights only repeat themselves when it matters.  (The repetition of the chained mouth seems to me much more evident.  I assume it is to you, too.  If not, do let me know.)

To read Equus, Part I: The Three Questions, go here.  To read Equus, Part III:  The First Five Minutes, go here.

In class, an actor was working with Martin Dysart’s opening monologue in Equus.  He had done a cold reading of the speech the week before, and we had talked about the need to understand what the play is about, who the protagonist is, and why Shaffer has Dysart talking to the audience throughout the play.

When he brought the monologue back the following week, he had clearly done some work on it.  The speech was segmented into three parts, aligned with the divisions marked by the stage directions.  The first part was said in profile, with a certain amount of professorial distance and bemusement.  The second part connected him to the audience, and the third part gradually became more serious and contemplative.

I asked him if he had found the answers to the questions I’d asked the week before.  He had not.  In fact, it seemed that he still hadn’t thoroughly read the script, but was really just focusing on the monologue in isolation.

As for his choices, he told me that he couldn’t compete with Richard Burton and so had to start with himself, a position I affirmed.  We had talked about the fact that Equus is a poetic play in its use of language, but he had decided, at least for the moment (or permanently?  I couldn’t tell which), to ignore the poetry.

He was also concerned with the need to “grab” the audience in the first five minutes of the play, and in service of this goal, to make Dysart a likable character.  I think he had read something about the importance of doing this with any play.  It was certainly governing his performance that night.

Where do I begin?

The first problem is that you can’t work on any part of a play without reading the whole play attentively at least once.   I talk about this in an Actor’s Etiquette post, so I won’t go into the reasons here.  But you just can’t.  Don’t waste your time.

Here are just two of the things you will notice if you read Equus in its entirety, both of which impact this monologue.  The first is that the same sentence opens both acts:  “With one particular horse, called Nugget, he embraces.”

The second is that five sentences into the play comes the line, “I keep seeing that huge head kissing him with its chained mouth.” The last lines of the play are:  “There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain.  And it never comes out.”

I’ll talk about the opening sentence when I talk about poetry.  But the part about the chained mouth bears directly on the question of what and who is this play about.

Equus is NOT about a boy who blinds horses.  It is about the psychiatrist who treats him realizing that the boy lives with a passion that he, Dysart, does not.  In the opening monologue, we meet a man in crisis.

While he does talk with another character about his life, it is the monologues that reveal the true torment he experiences.  In them, he shares secrets we just don’t share with other people, except perhaps a psychiatrist.  Dysart is psychoanalyzing himself.  The fact that he has no close friend or lover with whom he can share his feelings is part of the point – part of the reason he is in this predicament.

And when he talks about the horse’s head, he is talking about himself.  He admits as much in the second half of the monologue, and the final lines of the play remind us of this sympathy he has with the horse.  This identification has to be present from the beginning of the monologue.  It’s not intellectual curiosity on Dysart’s part that makes him wonder about what the horse feels.  He – and Shaffer – are indirectly examining Dysart’s own internal goings-on.  The horse is merely metaphor.

Understanding the answers to the three questions I raised in the opening paragraph gives you some clear direction as to where to take the monologue.  You’ll find those answers only by reading the play.

I’ll talk about other issues with this monologue in the next two posts.

To read Equus, Part II: Poetic Language, go here.  To read Equus, Part III:  The First Five Minutes, go here.

In class two weeks ago, the actors were busily making arbitrary choices about their characters.

It’s fascinating to watch.  Despite talking about how unproductive this approach is, people instinctively use it.  It’s almost an uncontrollable impulse.  (I’m not criticizing my students for doing this.  We all do it.  Learning how to act is, in part, learning when we’re being arbitrary so that we can stop.  When I point out to my students what they’re doing, they quickly recognize what I’m talking about and why it matters.  Which is why they are such wonderful students!)

Arbitrary choices are the ones we decide on before trying them to see if they work.  “This is what I should do here.”  They don’t spring organically out of what actors call “the work”, but are intellectual choices we impose on our performances.  It’s the “decider” in us looking for certainty.  “There!  Thank goodness, another problem put to bed!”

Deciding upon them in advance can prove fatal.  We become so attached to them that we will give them up only if they prove to be disastrous.  The moment we make the decision, we have closed ourselves off to ANY OTHER possibility, no matter how good it is.  Our subconscious even stops working on the problem.  It’s done!  Solved!

One actress, following the first read-through of a brand new scene, responded to my question about her gut reaction to the character by saying, “I didn’t really notice, I was busy trying to figure out where I should be laughing.”

Laughter is not something you should plan for unless the dialogue makes it clear that you have to laugh.  Then you have no choice.  Otherwise, laugh if, as the character, you genuinely find something to be funny.  Don’t if you don’t.

I asked her about the times when she did laugh during the scene.  Were they the “right” times?

        Her:  “Well, they were pretty much real laughs.”

        Me:  “No wonder they worked so well!”

Lesson:  Real emotions are very effective on stage.  Laughing was entirely appropriate to her character, so those real laughs worked.  Artificially imposed laughs rarely are believable.

Another actress, who performed a lengthy monologue, opted to sit at one point in the middle of the speech and then sprang up almost immediately, standing or walking for the remainder of it.  We talked about it afterwards.

        Me:  You sat down at one point . . .

        Her:  Yes, and it was a mistake.

        Me:  I’m not so sure it was.  It actually seemed to suit the moment very well.  It was the springing back up that
seemed out of place.

I suggested that there was good dramatic support for sitting for a portion of the monologue, but that there were a variety of options in terms of timing the sit and stand.  At which point, she said, “I know!  I should sit on THIS line.”

Maybe.  Maybe not.

It is perfectly okay to say, “Let me try doing this here.”  That’s a very different thing than saying, “I should do this.” Once you’ve tried it, you can determine its effectiveness.  You can then try other alternatives and compare the results.  In her particular situation, there were a variety of choices worth exploring.  The line she selected was the most obvious choice – predictable, even – but that doesn’t automatically make it the best.

When you make intellectual decisions outside of the framework of actually running the scene, you are making arbitrary choices that have nothing to do with the emotional life of your character.  It is an external you are strapping onto your character, whether she likes it or not.

If you find that choice through trying various options during a run-through of the scene, great.  But if you choose it based on your intellectual assessment of the play, it will never work well, no matter how “right” the choice is.  Like line readings, such choices have a foundation of quicksand that will give way at some point.

To read Isn’t the Obvious Choice Sometimes the Right Choice?, go here.