Naked Harry Potter Will Teach You Things About Yourself
It's sort of gauche to post a theatre "review" while the show is still in previews, so consider the following not so much of a review as a...um...preview. I managed to score a ticket to Equus last night, the new Broadway production of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play about the sometimes disastrous confluence of religion and sex, and the perils of "modern" psychiatry. But really, the play is important because Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe is naked in it. For a good amount of time! Though I should caution that the nudity is exactly as sexy as the ensuing frenzied horse blinding sounds. It's not a gimmick or a parlor trick, just a way to communicate the raw bewilderment and wildness of Radcliffe's character, the troubled young Alan Strang. So yeah, the play about the nudity isn't so much about the nudity at all, rather it's an interesting, if curiously unmoving, intellectual deep dive into an idea of faith and science—reason, really—as two warring acts of the same mind.