Shaffer wrote the play in 1973 after hearing a news account of a teenager who blinded six horses with a spike. The plot riffs on the juxtaposition between a 17-year-old boy's (Alan Strang) obsessive releases of passion (horses) and a middle-aged psychiatrist (Martin Dysart) wondering how he settled into his own malaise.

It starts in Dysart's office, where the psychiatrist is trying to unlock the events that led to the crime. We learn that Strang's mother is a hard-line Catholic who placed a picture of Christ's crucifixion near the foot of his bed. His father, an atheist, removed the picture and replaced it with a photo of a horse.

Easily malleable, Alan is soon worshipping the equine as a god and a sexual being.

Enter the archetype: Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of horse sacrifices that took place before people learned to write. The rite persisted well into the Roman Empire.

The question soon becomes whether it's better to be abnormal and brilliantly driven, or normal for the sake of fitting in to society. A series of shadowy actors, adorned with skeleton horse heads, act as the play's chorus.

"I think artists are attracted to it because it asks the big questions about pursuing passion versus pursuing a more sort of normal life," he said. "You always long to go after your passion, and the big voice that haunts Dysart in the play is the voice that keeps telling him he should be doing something else.

"Obviously it's an engaging theater piece just to stage it," he said. "You have actors playing horses, and how do you do that and not be silly about it."

Brandon Demery (Dysart) is a Juilliard-trained actor recently seen in "Tommy" and "Noises Off." Sybil Lines (Dora Strang) spent two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company and has been teaching Shakespeare at the University of Alaska Southeast for the last few weeks.

SUZY LAFFERTY / JUNEAU EMPIRE   The truth: Left, Dysart (Brandon Demery) shakes Alan Strang (Levi Fiehler) after administering a truth pill.

And Juneau's Levi Fiehler (Alan Strang) is in his first major role on the main stage. The character, as Paparelli notes, forces the 22-year-old Fiehler to be "completely vulnerable and completely open." He's playing a mentally tortured 17-year-old who's (a) completely naked (b) in love with horses and (c) covered in fake blood and sand.

"It's important, especially with a play like this, that you are around people you trust and enjoy spending day after day with," Fiehler said. "And I most definitely have. That was also the reason I decided to do it in the end.

"I was and actually still am terrified of this role," he said. "Because you do have to be 'completely vulnerable and completely open.' Otherwise it won't ring true at all. That's what's been so scary and exciting about rehearsals: one day it will feel really genuine and that I've taken a step forward and the next it feels terrible and that I'm forcing it.

"It's just hard to commit yourself sometimes," he said. "I mean, I'm the guy at the pool who showers with his underwear on, so to be naked on a guy's back pretending he's a horse, in front of my grandmother, will be a new experience for me."

The theater originally hoped to stage the play near the Treadwell Mine ruins on Sandy Beach but abandoned those plans. The city charges a fee for beach rental, and the weather contingencies proved too cumbersome.

Still, the set includes one integral element of the Douglas beach - the sand.

It covers the stage's front half, setting the scene on the beach where Alan meets Nugget the horse and later rides him naked and bareback.

A series of tall, suspended, metal spikes slice through the foreground at odd angles to create a chaotic, fractured environment - much like the mindset of Alan and Dysart.

A giant transparent scrim - vandalized with jagged slashes - separates the dream-like stable world in the back of the stage. This is where the story enters the clouded recesses of Strang's passion, his love for the horse.

"We used the art of Jackson Pollock as a starting point for the wall," said set designer Tanna Peters, who last worked on Juneau Lyric Opera's "Beauty and the Beast."

SUZY LAFFERTY / JUNEAU EMPIRE   One of the play's skeleton horse heads rests in the foreground of the set.

Historians have been asking the same questions and making the same comments about ancient and modern civilization since Gibbon's "Decline and Fall."

The audience will be surrounded with a wall of barbed wire that snakes along the theater's wall. As a whole, the set functions as what Paparelli and Peters call "the sacred space."

"Gods, religion and the sacred are woven throughout the scripts," Peters said. "While the two are physically in Dysart's psychiatric office, they enter into the sacred spaces in Alan's mind, places he has made his 'holy of holies.'"

Also see: A change of perspective.

• Korry Keeker can be reached at korry.keeker@juneauempire.com.