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I was lucky enough to see Amadeus on opening night, and to be sitting in the center seat in the very back row. What most astonished me, on entry, was of course the set--the framing of the whole proscenium with a curly head of hair. The stage itself thus became the "head" of Salieri--an astonishing representation of the notion that the whole story is taking place inside his head. Even more clever was the moment in his first soliloquy, when he calls up the ghosts of the future to hear the story he has to tell, and the house lights go up--making it clear to all of us (who might have thought we were just sitting in the audience of a performance!) that we are also-and-actually occupants of the brain of the storyteller...

I am this week discussing the last of the Wilma's productions, Brecht's The Life of Galileo, with a group of first year students at Bryn Mawr College, and --as one of them said in our course forum--their imagination has been captured by the notion that our whole system of order is ...a construct of our minds:

It’s kind of troubling to think that you think you are learning all this knowledge, but it is really just things other people have said...you have actually become conditioned not to think for yourself, and feel that you can’t.

What I like about the plays Galileo & Amadeus , and about these forums in which we can keep on talking about them, is the way in which they invite those of us who attend (and attend to) the performances to do that sort of thinking for ourselves.