I saw Harry Potter's Hairy Potter....

Today I got a cheap ticket and went downtown to see Eqqus, a play on Broadway staring Daniel Radciff (hence the title, and here's the obligatory credit to Megan for the wit). I read the play for a scenic design class about a year ago, so I was very excited to see it. The whole thing is about this 17 year old boy, Alan Strang (aka Harry Potter), who blinds six horses with a spike and the psyciatrist who treats him after. It takes place during his sessions, so there are a lot of flash backs and memories. The show deals a lot with religion, sex, happiness, worship and other non-pc topics. There were a lot of similarities in my set design and the production's, but one thing they did that I never thought of was to have on stage seating. While this has been a popular thing to do recently, they did it really cool with this one. The seats were raised to be at the same height as the mezzanine which gave it the appearence of a working surgery theater (in operating rooms they often have a glassed in seating area raised up where other doctors can look in and watch surgeries). I found this to be a really interesting concept since essentially that is what the entire audience was doing, looking in on the sessions of a patient. I never thought of this while reading the play, but it worked perfectly in this production, especially when you think about what the play is trying to make you take away from it.

Anyway, here's my illegal picture pre-show. Shhhh! Don't tell anyone you saw it here! You can see the two rows of onstage seating and then the silver oval things are the horse masks that six men wore to depict the horses. They did a truley amazing job with that. Sitting there, you completely forgot they were people. The actors had the manerisms and movements down perfectly. The tall cubes were moved around and sat on their sides to represent different types of furniture and settings, which was something I did in my design as well. All in all, it was a very good production and probably one of the most enjoyable straight plays I've ever seen.