The last waltz

Paula Vogel’s elegy to a dying brother

by Robert von Stein Redick

The Baltimore Waltzplays through October 15 at USM’s Russell Hall. For ticket information call 780-5256.

THE BALTIMORE WALTZ: stars Matt Curtis, John Hildreth, and Elizabeth Chambers.

Before I found my seat at the USM production of The Baltimore Waltz, I was accosted by a clown. His antics — refusing relinquish my seat, making great fun of folding, tearing, and passing me a pink triangle — were clownish enough. Still, he did not inspire any easy laughs. His red smile was a savage arc of lipstick, painted on a white surgical mask. Carnival and clinic vied for the rest of his outfit as well. He looked like a male nurse assaulted by a P.T. Barnum makeup squad.

Surviving the encounter, I looked up at a stage that was indeed decked out like a tiny circus, complete with three round risers, see-saws, and calliope tunes. But the slide flashed on the wall behind the stage gave no excuse for a carnival. It was a letter to author Paula Vogel from her brother Carl, dying in a Maryland hospital. It gave specific instructions for his funeral, options for the disposal of his remains. The letter appears as a preface to the published script, and it’s no fiction. Carl died less than a year later, from AIDS.

In the play, it appears that death is in the cards not for Carl (who is also a character) but for his sister, a grade-school teacher named Anna. She is rather chaste and quiet; Carl is two years older, gay, and defiant: his on-the-job introduction has him teaching children at the San Francisco Public Library to play “On Strike!” with raised middle fingers. Seconds later (in another of the circus rings) the scene is a hospital clinic, where Anna receives her ridiculous death sentence: one of her students has given her Acquired Toilet Disease (ATD), and nothing at all can be done.

It gets weirder, and fast. The clock ticking, sister and brother light out for Europe on the grand tour they have always dreamed of. Grandest of all for Anna is her unleashed libido, which in true après moi le déluge style targets every waiter, bellhop, golden-haired Dutchman, and other cardboard caricature of the European male imaginable. For Carl, having fun is not so easy. In addition to holding out hope for a cure (involving a Strangelovian doctor who prescribes drinking urine), he is shadowed by sinister men in trenchcoats, men who seem to know him.

By the time one of these men breaks his silence, we’ve begun to suspect what the message will be. The happy holiday-abroad illusion is crumbling. Carl speaks of palaces, famous ruins: slides appear of the Johns Hopkins hospital, Baltimore slums.

It’s much to the credit of director Wil Kilroy and his student trio that all this humping, clowning, crying, and dying hangs together as well as it does. Elizabeth Chambers (Anna) ably straddles the roles of dying teacher, sex tourist, and grieving survivor; she even succeeds, in her wide-eyed, full-throttle embrace of all three, to make them seem natural together. John Hildreth’s Carl has equal measures of toughness and vulnerability; his baby-soft face turns dangerous the instant he lowers those wicked eyebrows. Matthew P. Curtis, as the Baltimore doctor and 15-odd European strangers, has the good sense to play them to the cartoonish extremes the story demands. As a French waiter, his suggestiveness in handling the desert tray alone justifies the “Not For Young Audiences” warning label on the program.

Of course it can’t last, given the play’s AIDS-crisis infrastructure. Carnal fun and games are ultimately just the shout of denial as carnal frailty takes over. The Baltimore Waltz is at heart an elegy, and elegy gives the critic pause. No sensitive person can witness a tale of agonizing loss and yearn to snatch at it with his or her literary pincers. We shy away from pain and death as much as the next person. Nor can we pretend to pass judgment on mourning.

In the introduction, Vogel describes her brother’s proposal for a joint trip to Europe — an offer she declined, unaware of his condition. He was dead less than two years later. Reflecting on this grim factual center to The Baltimore Waltz, I am reminded of nothing so much as Camus’s doctor in the quarantined city of The Plague, listening to his short-wave as “from the ends of the earth, across thousands of miles of land and sea, ” strangers offer condolence and solidarity. “In vain the call rang over the oceans, in vain [the doctor] listened hopefully; always the tide of eloquence began to flow, bringing home still more the unbridgeable gulf that lay between.”

If I admit (as I must) that this play’s æsthetic of mourning — denial, fantasy, role-reversal, ultimate acceptance — does not bridge the gulf for me, I do so from the shelter of my particular good fortune. And whether one has been personally touched by AIDS or any other devastation, one can only applaud the playwright’s sincere audacity. Vogel chooses to address her real brother’s death through a surreal gauze. This, too, is pain avoidance of a sort. Her conviction seems to be that only a sidelong and slippery approach to this all-too-common tragedy can trick us into seeing it as it must have been. Merciless. Unappeasable. Absurd.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.