 |  |  |  |  |
Usher Nonsense Vol. 2, No 18
THE BALTIMORE WALTZ by Paula Vogel (Long Christmas Ride Home, Oldest Profession),
Directed by Mark Brokaw (Long Christmas Ride Home, Reckless)
With David Marshall Grant, Kristen Johnston, Jeremy Webb
Set Design – Neil Patel (Beard of Avon, Long Christmas Ride Home, Between Us), Costume
Design – Michael Krass, Lighting Design Mark McCullough (Reckless, Twelve Angry Men)
Signature Theatre Company, 555 West 42nd Street Phone: (212) 244-7529)
through January 9, 2005
I’m about to give a plot point away, so you might want to read this later. I’m doing it because I’m
the sort of person who often doesn’t read reviews before I go see a performance. I like to read
them afterwards and compare my observations with the reviewer’s. So when I got to the end of
this play only to discover that the entire thing had been a dream – I was sorely disappointed.
It is a brave play, written in the early 1990’s as a comedy about AIDS. Anna (Johnston) learns she
has an incurable disease contracted through exposure to toilet seats. She is an elementary school
teacher, and because young children are really Petri dishes with legs, it is thought she might have
contracted it through one of her students. But which little creep was it? I like Johnston's work
very much and am glad to see a television actor working on the stage. She is able to bring the
suspicion and fear of the 1980’s flaring up into the open for us - wearing a different suite of clothes
and bearing the sword of comedy.
As a consolation, her brother takes her to Europe where she screws her way from one country to
another. Jeremy Webb plays all her foreign sexual partners. He is hilarious, sharp, and tender as
well. While her brother has odd secret meetings, presumably to find black market drugs for her,
she and her lovers carry on and on and on. Until the end, when we find Anna sitting outside her
brother’s room in the hospital, talking to us about the trip to Europe that she never took with her
brother who has just died.
Slam. Bang. Crash. Clunk. I was going along just fine until this point. Then suddenly we
changed horses and I got dumped in the creek. It’s entirely personal, of course, but I liked the
original premise of the satire Vogel created. It had depth and sparkle and tread a very daring path.
Vogel got me to invest in that story, and I wanted her to take me to the finish of it. Instead, Vogel
created an ending that pulled me up short and left me feeling disoriented.
©2005 by Tulis McCall