At the center of Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus" is a triangle of relationships, among the anti-hero Salieri, God, and Mozart. Salieri tells us that he begged God to allow him to be God's servant. He wanted to be made a composer and God, he tells the audience, made him one. Then Mozart, an upstart 20-something, comes along and Salieri realizes that his own music pales in comparison to Mozart's. He is both deeply moved by Mozart's music and uncontrolably envious of his talent and what he believes will be the immortality of his music. He pleads with God to allow him to be the instrument through which God creates one piece of music comparable to Mozart's but it never happens. Consequently, Salieri goes into battle with God but does so by ruining Mozart's career.
Salieri is constantly surprised that God never stops him. Instead, Salieri continues to collect accolades and his fortune grows as Mozart grows increasingly poorer and sicker as the result of his cunning. Mozart, he tells us, is the instrument through which he does battle with God. By ruining Mozart, the true instrument of God's beauty, he is getting back at God. The play raises the question of how one sustains such a relationship with God? Can it ever be done but through our relationship with others? If Salieri says he is fighting with God, we only see the wounds manifested on Mozart's body. That is the issue with maintining a relationship with a disembodied being; that relationship can only be manifested in human form. God's stand-in is Mozart. He is the cause and the target of Salieri's, no matter what he calims his real motivations are.
In the end, it turns out that what Salieri wants most, if he can't have divine talent, is immortality. Fame he's got and it's not enough. And since he can't have Mozart's talent, he decides to at least settle for fame as the man who kills Mozart. It is reputed that Mozart might have been poisoned by Salieri. In his old age, he cries out Mozart's name and begs his forgiveness but all of this is done just to start rumors. Knowing that his servants will spread the story and that the townspeople are gossips, he counts on the rumors to culminate in the belief that he murdered the genius Mozart. Then he tries to kill himself but fails. He is the high priest of mediocrity, he tells the audience, and we are his followers.
This is a serious accusation against the audience. Like the noblemen in the play who never acknowledge Mozart's genius but worship Salieri's mediocrity, the audience is implicaed as being unable to recognize real art and relying on what is fashionale, a particularly salient point at Chicago Shakespare Theatre. As I sat in my seat and listened to the wealthy patrons who surrounded me in the theater (this was opening night and geared at funders), I knew that Schaffer was speaking directly to the audience, accusing it. People around me audibly shared their agreement when Salieri, who addresses the audience directly, spews forth the most obvious and inane claims about our lack of understanding of art. At the end of the play, he says that as the priest of mediocrity he absolves the audience of its own mediocrity. One has to wonder, though, whether he is a priest with any power to absolve us. Having Salieri absovle us is perhaps the most brutal accusation from the playwright. Schaffer allows us to see Salieri for the pathetic being he is over time. For a while we think he's funny, then we think he's dangerous, then we realize that he's failed himself in every way. Schaffer has no sympathy for him and in aligning the audience with Salieri, he's making an unsympathetic accusation of the audience. During intermission, an audience member was praising the performance of the actor playing Salieri. He commented that this actor's portrayal was so funny when it's usually so dark in other productions of this play. Well, it's a funny role and I've only ever seen it played that way. I think he must have confused the play with Milos Forman's movie. This kind of pretension is perhaps indicative of the behavior Schaffer is ridiculing.
I last saw a production of this play at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia a little less than two years ago. It was a highly stylized version done all in black and white with lots of patent leather clothes and boots, somewhere between baroque and punk rock -- the kind of production we might call edgy. Sadly, it was dull, dull, dull. While the director had gone to great lenghts to make it look oppulent and "edgy," he had spent too little time explorng the humanity and the play's themes. Thankfully, Gary Griffin hasn't fallen into that trap. The acting is very, very good and the direction emphsizes the humanity of the characters. The thing I've largely admired Griffin for is his reliance on the humanity of characters and the meaning of plays rather than relying on large production values, something Chicago Shakespeare Theatre itself is too often guilty of doing. I'm not sure why Barbara Gaines, the artistic director, chose this play. It's good but it certainly isn't timeless. Still, Griffin's production has a lot of integrity. He's chosen to stage most of it on the thrust so that the action takes place in the audience rather than on the proscenium, which would have distanced the action from the audience. And, in a play that suggests that the audience members are followers of Salieri the Mediocre, it seems appropriate that he's choosen such a staging.
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