By Robert Bethune
Literary types can have a field day with Paula Vogel's "The Baltimore Waltz," now in production at the Blackbird Theatre. One of my favorite theses is that every good comedy is about something serious, and it is hard to get more serious than the underlying concerns of this play. Another of my favorite theses, a bit more tongue in cheek, is that no great play has ever been written or ever will be written about anything other than sex or death. This play feeds both my theses! What more can a guy want?
Unfortunately, if I go into details on that, I'll spoil it for you. So all I can do is drop hints. Paula Vogel's approach to the play consists, in a way, of determinedly and rapidly dropping hints for as long as possible before quite suddenly showing where all the hints lead – which is where the laughter stops.
It's really meaningless to talk about this play in terms of a straightforward story. It's a jumpy fantasy world, where we hop from idea to idea, from place to place, from bed to bed with without worrying one bit about how we get there. We have a brother Carl, played with a sort of angelic mania by Michael Williams, and a sister Anna, played with a very different sort of mania, a schoolteacher's fantasy of release. Then we have The Third Man, straight out of the Grahame Green/Carol Reed/Joseph Cotton/Orson Welles movie of the same name – we even have the scene about the death in traffic. The many faces of The Third Man are rendered by Adam Rzepka with monumental menace alternating with many flavors of European silliness. Wa-Louisa Hubbard's direction capitalizes on the youthful energy of the cast to really keep the play moving across the very simple but effective set, designed by Barton Bund.
Modern writers of and about literature and drama love to pontificate about language in various ways. Vogel breaks through all that because she has gleaned the very refreshing insight that language can be funny. Particularly, language barriers, medical jargon and other ways in which language sometimes blocks understanding rather than facilitating it can put people in funny situations, even when the situations are also very serious indeed.
Last but not least, if you're a very brave comic writer, as Vogel is, you go light-heartedly where serious dramatists fear to tread. Sickness and death aren't funny – except when they are, because sometimes human beings are just going to do what they do, what they have to do and what they want to do, when confronted with such things. They may be very serious and solemn and adult, or they may fly off into the wildest world of fantasy. Which does Vogel do? Like Deion Sanders: "Both."
And then there's the rabbit. By all means, do not ignore the rabbit! Dare we link this play to the "Oresteia" as well as to "The Third Man"? There certainly is a bunny in the "Oresteia," but Vogel does not bring the eagles of Zeus into this play. There are limits to bravery after all.
'The Baltimore Waltz'
Blackbird Theatre, 1600 Pauline Blvd., Ann Arbor. Friday-Sunday, through June 7. Tickets: $20. 734-332-3848 or http://www.blackbirdtheatre.net
