Peter Shaffer’s “Equus” should be seen by packed houses every night of its run at Lakewood’s Beck Center for the Arts. And not just because this is a brilliant and beautiful and riveting production, but because it is the kind of theater experience that is enhanced by being shared.

“Equus” depicts the encounter between English psychiatrist Martin Dysart (played by Matthew Wright) and Alan Strang, a deeply disturbed adolescent played by Dan Folino. In the course of a quickly unfolding psychological detective story, Alan reveals the chain of circumstance—forged across an isolated and troubled lifetime—that leads to a shocking and repugnant crime.

Over time Alan has conjured up, from an early childhood fascination with horses, an elaborate and passionate and deeply personal religious faith replete with rituals and incantations and a complex belief system. Like any passionately held religious faith, it affirms the boy’s sense of self in a hostile world and creates order and meaning out of the chaos of his emotional distress. And it channels his adolescent sexuality into a highly ritualized and secret sacrament.

But the God that Alan Strang worships also enslaves him, and in a moment of crisis and opportunity turns on him in a jealous rage. Trapped between his own human frailty and the demands of a furious deity, Alan lashes out violently, blinding six horses in a country stable with a metal spike.

That might seem like spectacle enough, but the real story lay in the deepening relationship between Alan and Dysart, who sees in the boy’s hostile glare a reproach to his own passionless life and the reflection of a deepening fear about the nature of his work. “My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband, a caring citizen, a worshipper of an abstract and unifying god,” he says. “My accomplishment is much more likely to make a ghost!”

Director Bill Roudebush, who won the Barrymore Award for Best Director and Best Production for the play in Philadelphia four years ago, notes that when Equus was first introduced in 1974 the elaborate stage action surrounding the horses elicited from directors every kind of special effects wizardry imaginable.

Thirty years later Roudebush has pared the performance down to its essentials, stripping it—like the horse actors who appear naked on stage except for sheer, skin-tight briefs—of every contrivance by which viewers are normally expected to forget they are watching a play.

When viewers walk into the theater they see the lighting fixtures and other trappings of the theater fully exposed, and the actors who play the horses already on stage, stretching and exercising and limbering up just as (one supposes) they might be doing more typically backstage. Uncannily, their preparations begin slowly to take on the restlessness of horses so that when the play begins they have become a stable of sleek beasts, cantering and snorting and braying.

There is not a weak link in the cast: Alan, slouching and glaring and jumpy with pent-up teenage hostility; Dysart, rumpled and over-worked and drowning in middle-age self-reproach; and Hesther, his case worker friend, who is brisk and efficient and social workerly as she pleads with Dysart to stick, in the midst of his crisis, to basics: “children before adults” and “the good smile in a child’s eyes.”

Yet it does not seem too odd to suggest that the stars of this show are the horses who stalk the stage, real in their near-nakedness yet also dream-like and mythological. Franklyn Singley, an elite skater and ice dancer by profession, is brilliantly cast as Nugget, the sleek and majestic lead horse. The proof of the success of this transformation—and of the entire production—comes in the final stable scene when the bizarre crime appears not only believable but inevitable.

The play is “relevant” in any number of ways. As Roudebush says, “I can’t imagine any ten people would walk away from this play with the same thing.” Surely, Dan Folino’s Alan evokes the disaffected slackers of our day, sullen and barely articulate, spitting their illiteracy back at a world they didn’t create, but possessed at times of a vicious wit.

Yet Roudebush believes the drama is evocative of the Greek amphitheater, and as such of more primal and eternal themes about the ways of God to man. Certainly, the world today is in the grip of a crisis over its religious faiths—faiths that we cling to yet which at times appear to enslave us and turn us violently against each other. Perhaps Alan Strang’s father (“old type socialist, relentlessly self-improving,” as Dysart tags him) is right when he says that religion is just “bad sex.”

And yet it is the psychiatrist Dysart, the avatar of science and reason, who feels most keenly the need for a more fundamental accounting. “And now for me it never stops,” he says, “that voice of Equus out of the cave—Why me? Why me? Account for me!”

This is a magnificent play. Roudebush calls Shaffer’s drama “one of the great plays of the 20th century.” His inventiveness and that of his actors in bringing this show to life is sure to repay audiences who, however it affects them, will not forget it.