Equus Group Presentation

It's not a one-man show

The nice thing about working in a large group like ours (with 7 members), is that we have 7 brains to work with. Every member of our group worked diligently to prepare our presentation on Peter Shaffer's Equus. Because it is problematic setting up a time to meet in person with 7 very busy people, we chose to collaborate online. Initially, our conversations took place via email, but this proved to be somewhat chaotic with the numrous threads; so instead, we chose an alternative method of communication: we created a blog devoted solely to our group. In this blog, we were able to post our ideas, share our thoughts, and come to a decision about how we will carry out our presentation.

Here's a link to our blog (created -- with aesthetic appeal -- by Margeaux):

http://equus638.blogspot.com/


This is where most of the behind-the-scenes stuff was carried out.

One of my contributions was the idea of bringing in the "escape" question during our presentation. Since Alan's violent action in the play is a form of psychological regression, I thought a good "ice-breaker" activity might be to ask the class what their form of escape is -- or, if this was too personal, we decided we could ask them to identify a form of regression in a different character (from a different book, film, etc). Although this was my initial idea, we ended up carrying it out a little differently during our presentation. We incorporated this question into our "grid," and each group discussed it amongst themselves.

Another contribution was bringing in the outside source to talk about the various relationships within the play. Although the article I researched was about the failed heterosexual relationships within the play (and its conclusion that the play is homosexual), this article opened the door to discuss various aspects of the sexual/non-sexual relationships in Equus.

Our group presentation was a collaboration -- everyone worked well with each other, and we had a good time. For this reason, I'd say that it was a success!