Drama tackles grief, loss ‘Baltimore Waltz’ gets stirring rendition

BELFAST – Paula Vogel couldn’t take the time for a European trip with her brother Carl in the late 1980s. Nearly two years later, he died from AIDS. At the time of his invitation, she had no idea he was sick.

We all know what it’s like to wish we had taken more time and traveled more with people we unexpectedly lose. But most of us don’t know how to manage the sense of tragic failure that sometimes lingers after the funeral. Vogel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, turned her grief into “The Baltimore Waltz,” a wrenching, smartly staged comic drama running through Sunday, June 13, at the Belfast Maskers’ Waterfront Theater.

Vogel, who directs the playwriting program at Brown University in Providence, R.I., imagined the 90-minute show while sitting in the hospital waiting room in Baltimore hoping to hear news of her brother. A few years later, “The Baltimore Waltz” took its place in the body of American works known as AIDS plays, including Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” William Hoffman’s “As Is,” and eventually Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” The topic is still clearly cogent in this country with the recent HBO version of “Angels” and a New York revival of “The Normal Heart” this spring.

Anger can easily and rightly inform art about AIDS, yet Vogel’s play couches it in humor and fantasy, as well as a reversal of illness. In the central brother-sister relationship, it is Anna, who is afflicted with a fatal malady. She has ATD – Acquired Toilet Disease – which strikes schoolteachers careless enough to share toilet seats with their students. Her brother, Carl, named for Vogel’s beloved sibling, takes Anna on a surreal and dizzying European adventure in search of eccentric underground doctors, unapproved medicines, sexual affairs and escape from the inevitable.

Jennifer DeJoy, as Anna, and Nathan Raleigh, as Carl, create the roles with a sharp sense of character, timing and emotion. DeJoy is particularly powerful and, as the demands of the role increase, DeJoy gracefully and intelligently navigates the complexities. She permits the audience to feel her confusion, anger, fear, lust and love, but she never asks for pity or praise. She simply offers Anna as a person caught in a nightmare, and her performance is heartbreakingly effective.

Raleigh, who towers over DeJoy, is also very adept at showing Carl as a man of tenderness, wit and drive.

The two actors are given extraordinary support by Tim Collins, who plays a variety of roles – from sinister to silly – for which he makes quicksilver changes into costumes by Kathleen Brown. There are 30 episodic scenes in this fast-paced, intermission-free play, and Collins is often the outside force that kick-starts the action. He’s also very funny. The medical gloves he wears throughout the show are creepy, but they are a clue: Anna is not in a dream but in a Baltimore hospital where the real story belongs to her dying brother.

Director Larraine Brown fearlessly brings the Belfast Maskers back to its roots as one of Maine’s finest community theaters with this eulogistic drama. Her creative team, including Ivy Lobato working lights, gives a human face and heart to this story.

Vogel has the tricky task of recreating a very personal memoir for a public audience. Mostly, her writing doesn’t back itself into self-serving corners. The credit for that may, in part, go to her college history teacher. In a TV interview a few years ago, Vogel said he taught her that “in 4th Century B.C. in the Greek democracy, citizens were required to go to the theater. It was a requirement of all citizens because we come together as people and we go through a communal experience, a journey … If there are 200 people in the theater, there will be 200 plays that the audience see, each one for themselves, that night.”

The Belfast Maskers production of “The Baltimore Waltz” is adult theater that leaves you thinking about the world around you and the person next to you. This is not easy theater, but, at its best, it has the potential to create stronger communities and more sure-footed democracies.

The Belfast Maskers will present “The Baltimore Waltz” at 8 p.m., June 10-12, and 2 p.m., June 3, at the Waterfront Theater, 43 Front St., Belfast. The play contains adult material and language. For information and tickets, which cost $15, call 338-9668. Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.