Silliness, grief are partners in ‘Waltz’
Silliness has rarely looked so multifaceted, so complex, as it does in the Magic Theatre production of Paula Vogel’s “The Baltimore Waltz” that opened Wednesday, March 29.
Only sometimes does the show, directed by Jonathan Moscone, indulge in bug-eyed facial expressions, sexual double entendres and exaggerated foreign accents solely to make you guffaw. More often, other purposes drive the melodramatic dance flourishes and recurring costume
gags.
At times, the humor exists to show how the sophisticated, erudite Carl (Patrick Alparone) and hungry, lusty Anna (Lauren English), though now fully grown adult siblings on an extravagant tour of Europe, have somehow maintained with each other the giggly affection, the disarming candor, the lack of physical boundaries — where do I end and you begin? — of childhood.
At other times, the jokes slyly, subtly condemn the political climate in which Vogel wrote the play in 1992 and whose contemporary echoes are all too resonant. She wrote “The Baltimore Waltz” after her brother died from complications of AIDS, and though the play never mentions that disease, it’s nonetheless haunted by a mysterious fatal illness believed to be transmitted through toilet seats. A public health official (Greg Jackson, who plays with gusto the countless cartoonish characters the brother and sister encounter on their travels) proclaims “Acquired Toilet Disease,” with no small amount of self-congratulation, “our 82nd national health priority.”
At still other moments, the show’s giddiness helps it soar past the limitations of realism, into a realm that blends memory and fantasy, dream and nightmare. That’s what Carl and Anna are trying to do: have one last hurrah, check travel abroad off the bucket list before Anna succumbs to ATD. Even Nina Ball’s set straddles the earthbound and the heavenly. The linoleum floor, the fluorescent lights suspended over the stage, the leached shade of green of the featherweight curtains — all these scream “hospital.” And yet, when those curtains start to take flight, zooming back and forth throughout the play, their skirts flaring, it’s as if you’re in one of the dreamy Fred-and-Ginger dance sequences that temporarily break from the reality of the story so that the couple can whisk and whirl about the cosmos.
English makes Anna wondrously childlike. Her every pout, bit of blubbering, frothy desire seems to come from naked impulse, from a complete lack of adult inhibition. Just listen to her respond with only gurgles and grunts in, say, a doctor’s office. Her characterization helps quell any expectation that “The Baltimore Waltz” is a play in which rules must be followed.
Alparone’s job is harder. His character can register as saintly, which doesn’t give one as much to play with as an actor. Still, if initially he seems to perform too forcefully for the Magic’s intimate venue, bide your time. His characterization gives “Waltz” one of its biggest payoffs.
Still, all the show’s silliness wearies after a while — another European country with another set of national stereotypes to caricature? In a play with a sui generis blend of tones, Moscone’s direction doesn’t always land on the right one, which makes it difficult to tell or care about what the show is driving toward.
But oh, what it does drive toward. Ultimately, “The Baltimore Waltz” puts forth one of American drama’s most poignant, most lavishly theatrical visions of sibling bond, of sickness, of grief. If you’ve ever lost someone, or simply missed someone, and resorted to wild, shameful turns of the imagination to cope, this production both resurrects those feelings and offers the cathartic comfort that you are not alone in them.
The show’s giddiness helps it soar past the limitations of realism, into a realm that blends memory and fantasy, dream and nightmare.