on Equus

I was reading the playbill today, and something came to mind that I hadn't thought as much about before: the levels of mediation in Equus. The story is told by Dr. Dysart, the whole story. All of the events in the story except for this act of telling the audience have already happened in the past. We then jump back to when the magistrate came to tell him about Alan - we hear him telling us that she told him of the crime.

The most heavily layered section, I think, is toward the end when we see Alan and Jill in the barn, and Jill's dialogue is all in scene, but Alan's is relaying what happened (or lying about it) while Dysart pushes him, even taking on the voice of Equus, all the while relaying the events to the audience.

I would have liked to see that end sequence a little better, which is probably why I want to see it again, from the front.

So what does all of this layering mean? How are we to read it? I'm thinking back to my thesis, of course, and to a class I took a year and a half ago, where we discussed Wuthering Heights in terms such as these - especially the scene where the maid tells Nelly something she overheard, and Nelly's telling Mr. Lockwood, and Lockwood is telling us... I'm not going to use the word reliability, I simply refuse to, because it implies there is a knowable, objective truth, and we all know that's ridiculous.

But what I'm thinking is: it matters whether the unreliability is intended (i.e., the speaker wishes to hide something from the listener) or unintended, who is being misled and who is misleading... In the case of Equus, for example, when Mrs. Strang comes to Dr. Dysart's office, she tells the doctor something behind her husband's back - the story of the picture on Alan's wall. What is she hiding from by not telling her husband that she's telling the psychiatrist something her husband knows? The real question, of course, is: what is the author revealing to us about the relationship between the couple, about Alan's character, his upbringing, about psychiatry, about attitudes toward psychiatry, et cetera? And then: what does this scene and the play as a whole tell us about what growing up means, about religion and sex and gender?

The female characters in this play are less well-developed than the men, but I think that's largely because the two main characters are male. They are the two characters we are told the most about. We don't know why, for instance, Mr. Strang goes to the pornographic theater, just that Alan caught him and suspects he has been going regularly.

I was wondering if identifying the layers of mediation, of where time has been represented out of order, is one of the ways we can expose what the work is saying about its realworld context, but I'm also wondering if we shouldn't consider, not just the ways we disorganize things by attempting to represent them, but also the ways we attempt to reconstruct something from this thing that has been disorganized - what "really" happened. We try to figure things out, to locate the hidden truth, and then we happily announce it, whatever it is, and the possibility of multiple meanings means that we can each have our very own interpretation, just like we each have our own iPods, our own personal computers, our own blogs. Our own audiences.

That's Dysart's demand: he speaks directly to the audience, and he's the only one to do so - unlike a play I saw a year and a half ago - has it been so long? - called A Very Common Procedure where all three characters tell their story to the audience simultaneously. I'm digressing, but to take that example, they each have their own story to tell, even though it's the same story, and the way the play is structured, they tell the story together. They tell it to each other at the same time they are telling it to the audience, in some scenes. I'm just wondering where all of this über-compartmentalizing will lead, because (unlike our representation of it) time is very much a progression, even if we are unable to fathom points A or B...

Um. Wow, downer. In other news, I'm going to another play next Wednesday. Exciting!