Theater: Equus Infra Dig

STRIDER: THE STORY OF A HORSE

A play with music by Mark Rozovsky Adapted from a story by Leo Tolstoy

At its rare best, the theater possesses the uncanny ability to restore and sustain the virginity of a child’s imagination. The unmarred innocence of true belief. The faith in magic and miracles. The trust that humankind issues from the hand of God in luminous purity. The hope that life will some day safely return to that hand, however manacled, tormented and casually degraded by the world’s flagrantly iniquitous ways.

Can a horse embody that deep measure of humanity under the pressure of grace? If Tolstoy wrote the story, the answer is yes. And Tolstoy did write the tale that inspired the Russian play that has now been adapted to English with remarkable aesthetic fidelity for Manhattan’s Chelsea Theater Center.

A central factor is mime, in which a goodly number of the company mimic the balletic prancing of Thoroughbreds. The equine hero is Strider (Gerald Hiken), whose bloodlines must somewhere have tangled with those of Harpo Marx. Strider is a piebald gelding and, because of that, very infra dig. Metaphorically, he is a Russian serf in a land where serfdom, at all unhappy times, seems endemic. Yet all men are serfs of some sort, as Tolstoy points out. And every serf, like every dog, does have his glorious days. For Strider, the first is a fling at love with a filly fatale (Pamela Burrell), an adventure for which he is gelded. The second is a horse race in which he wins his master’s bet for him. His master is Prince Serpuhofsky (Gordon Gould), an engaging aristocrat of excess whose religion is hedonism and whose reigning vices are gambling and drink.

Strider and the prince plummet to their fates in parallel lines. The animal prince in Strider is flogged into the ground in a vain chase after Serpuhofsky’s faithless mistress (Burrell transformed into a heart wrecker of a woman). Strider ends in the knacker’s yard awaiting the knife. Serpuhofsky, too tipsy to stand up, a prince turned slave, a man who once commanded 2 million rubles, ends up trying to cadge a thousand from an arriviste. In a moment of extreme poignance, the prince spies Strider. He remembers him and yet refuses to recognize him. Time, the supreme sculptor of decay and death, has confronted him with his own crumbling skull in a mirror.

To praise Gerald Hiken as Strider might be too faint a thing to do. You only believe in him if you have ever been moved to laughter, truth and tears. No one can ask more of an actor at the match point of illumination.

The direction of Robert Kalfin and Lynne Gannaway smoothly accomplishes the transitional journey between one alien culture and another and knits both to gether in binding humanity. In his years as Chelsea’s artistic director, Kalfin has been a dramatic risk taker of taste.Never has it been more rewarding to share that risk.