We legacy media skew old. The grizzled goat in front of me, picking up press tickets at the Steppenwolf Theatre on Sunday night, asked, “Where’s the bathroom?” That seemed a smart idea.
We were about to see the Peter Shaffer play “Amadeus,” directed by Robert Falls, and with Falls you never know what mayhem is going to be unleashed onstage. One certainly doesn’t want to add to the pyrotechnics, unintentionally: “That old man who leapt up with a strangled cry during the quiet monologue and ran gibbering out of the theater — was that part of the show?”
“Take a right,” we were instructed. We confronted a blood red corridor and a single red door labeled, “ALL GENDER RESTROOM.” The men in front of us tottered in. I began to follow, but my wife froze. She wasn’t going in there after them.
I diverted my path, as well. Solidarity. We found a “PRIVATE BATHROOM” tucked to the left, and once we established there were no ominous males lurking inside, I sent her on her way and returned to the brave new world awaiting me — well, not so new; Steppenwolf was remodeled in 2021. But I hadn’t been there since then. COVID kneecapped my habit of going places and doing things, aided, I suppose, by gathering senescence.
What do you expect in a bathroom? Urinals, correct, if you’re a man? Stalls with toilets in them? Ah, ha-ha-ha. There was none of that. A blank white corridor that seemed like a set from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” I walked the length, found myself among the sinks, figured — hoped — that I’d missed something, that these weren’t the new sink/toilets I hadn’t yet heard about. So turned and tried a metal door handle I’d missed. Success!
Something new. But a change that can be adjusted to. I’ve never felt the overpowering bathroom shame that seems a major force in American politics. Then again, I’ve traveled internationally, which is fatal to such prejudices. I remember standing at a urinal in Tokyo, hat in hand, so to speak, when a grandmotherly cleaning lady with rubber gloves and a bucket came in, knelt and began to scrub the floor, almost at my feet. What can you do at that point but shrug and proceed? The sort of cultural enrichment one roams the globe to experience.
Then again, I’m a connoisseur of unease. On the drive in, I’d mused over the shocks that Falls has presented in the — geez — 40 years I’ve been seeing his shows, since Aidan Quinn slowly spray-painted, “To be or not to be” on a brick wall onstage at the Wisdom Bridge Theatre in 1985, turned to the audience, jerked his thumb at the dripping red paint, and said, “That’s the question!”
Full-frontal nudity, as in the “The Tempest.” Gloucester’s gouged-out eyes sizzling on a grill, from “King Lear.” And the zenith of Falls’ theater-as-a-thumb-jammed-in-the-audience’s-eye directorial style, the surprise stabbing of Isabella at the end of “Measure for Measure.” I thought patrons were going to rush the stage. The Goodman had to hold formal “conversations” immediately after each show, which were really just therapy sessions designed to help the audience find the strength to leave the theater and go about their lives.
“Amadeus” seemed fresh meat for Falls, with the pompous, plodding Vienna court composer, Antonio Salieri, passing judgment on the giggling, carnal man-boy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. What Grand Guignol thrills were in store?
The first act opens with Salieri dying on a cot. But as soon as actor Ian Barford stands up and starts to speak, the play is his, and Falls does something shocking in its own right. He steps back. Not that the action wasn’t crisply paced, despite the challenge of being performed in the round. It was. But there were no showy Falls signature moments that would have been so easy to include. Nobody copulates onstage. Mozart never drops his pants. When a throat is slit, there is no red sea of stage blood.
Which itself is a masterstroke, for Falls, and very in keeping with the play’s theme: how ego poisons everything. Salieri admires Mozart’s genius, and could help him. But he is jealous — why is he denied these gifts? So Salieri sets out to thwart Mozart instead, straining against the footnote he is doomed to become.
Falls realized: The play isn’t about himself; it’s about Salieri, and Mozart, and how flawed mortal creatures struggle to create perfect, timeless art. Sometimes, as another Chicago icon once said, “Less is more.” Realizing that everything is not about you is a priceless insight it takes a lifetime to learn, and many never manage it. Robert Falls has.