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| Brown succeeds with difficult `Waltz' |
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by Kelli Cousins
Brown College's production is an incredibly ambitious and difficult play -- Paula Vogel's 1989 The Baltimore Waltz satirizes all forms of media, from spy flicks to the Ricki Lake Show. Vogel's script calls for more light cues, music cues and scenery changes than all eight colleges' productions together would normally aspire to achieve in a year. The play centers around Carl (Bryan Wing) and Anna (Alesha Herrera), siblings who decide to go to Europe after Anna is diagnosed with ATD -- Acquired Toilet Disease. As part of his search for a cure for his sister, Carl connects with an old medical school friend, Harry Lime (Aaron Garcia), who promises to trade black market ATD drugs to Carl in return for a prized stuffed rabbit, Jo-Jo. Anna, on the other hand, does not seem as interested in finding a cure for her disease as she is in filling her last days with lots of meaningless sex. As they tour Holland, France and Germany, Anna tries to "fight the sickness of the body with the health of the body," while Carl is involved in a surreal rabbit-espionage plot. On a biographical note, the play was written shortly after the death of Vogel's brother, Carl, who was HIV positive. Waltz satirizes 1980s AIDS and HIV rhetoric through Anna's fictional disease while eulogizing the real Carl and allowing Vogel (and Anna) to explore and come to terms with the loss of life. It is very much a play much about being in transit -- running away from illness, death and sadness, and perhaps coming to some life-affirming conclusions. In the play, the characters must always be moving to suggest this spiritual instability. This production successfully gives the feeling of motion. Director Amanda Allison chose to house the production in the Kyle Morrow Room of Fondren Library, which slightly resembles a miniature hotel ballroom or banquet hall. It seems at first a wholly inappropriate place to perform a play, but it suits Waltz nicely, especially the pared-down version that Brown presents. The room does not allow for grandiose lighting plots, so Vogel's "lush and imaginative" lighting is cast by the wayside. The play does not suffer from this, however, because the actors adopt a broader, less realistic range of emotions in order to tip the audience off that the middle sections of the play, although resembling reality, are fantasy. This is a more subtle effect than casting a strobelight on chase scenes, but it works just as well. The acting held the play together in several places where Vogel relied (in the text) on technical effects. Herrera, as Anna, is sexy and funny, especially in her bedroom scenes. In the course of the play, her character achieves a newfound sexual freedom, which is charming. Wing, as Carl, admirably plays the straight man to his neurotic sister, and Garcia, with the daunting task of playing at least 10 different characters, has a kind of energy and comic spark that keep the production going. The only major failing of the play is that it does not have a set. Because of the rapport that the characters have with the audience, Allison chose to adopt a theater-in-the-round space, with audience on all sides and important set pieces that are moved on and off at nearly every scene end. To Allison's credit, this setup does bring the audience and the characters closer, not only spatially, but emotionally. However, since the play is composed of 30 separate scenes, the action has to stop for scene changes at least 20 times through the course of the evening, depending on which props need to be taken on or off the playing area. The movements of the play itself are very fluid, but it is hard to see the flow in this production when the action is constantly interrupted. On the whole, pressures of time and money make this play a very difficult one to produce. Vogel's lighting, music and set stipulations, as well as her constant media allusions, demand that anyone who wishes to produce or direct this play must take great care in making sure all the layers of dream, film and television fantasy and tragedy are dealt with efficiently. This flow keeps the whole play from falling apart. With the limited technical resources available, Allison is smart not to have over-reached her grasp in making the production too technically intensive. The play Allison presents succeeds where any other campus production of this play would fail. Opting for simplicity and giving the audience a kind of glorified reading of the play, she presents us with a lovely, distilled version of Vogel's fond farewell to her brother.
This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the March 14, 1997 issue. |
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