Main Street Stage in North Adams does “The Baltimore Waltz”

The Baltimore Waltz at Main Street Stage June 18-26

For Main Street Stage, one of two community theatres in North Adams,The Baltimore Waltz by Paula Vogel is a superb, even daring play to choose to perform in 2010. This is the play that thrust Vogel into national prominence. The Baltimore Waltz, which won the Obie award for Best Play in 1992, is an AIDS-related serio-comedy. She wrote it after her brother died of the disease, as a memorial to him. And the plot traces much the same arc as their lives as siblings. They were very close.

AIDS is not discussed in the play, but rather a fictitious disease, ATD (Acquired Toilet Disease) is the fulcrum on which the play moves between tragedy and farce. The plot is simple. Anna – to be played by Mollie O. Remillard – contracts ATD from using the bathrooms at the elementary school where she teaches. She and her brother Carl – Michael Trainor in this production – decide to throw caution to the wind and travel to Europe in search of hedonistic pleasure and a cure for her terminal illness.

Knowing her life is nearing its end, Anna is driven by a lust that compels her to have casual sex with as many men as possible during their travels, a passion shared by her gay brother. Assisting the pair is the mysterious Third Man (Jack Sleigh), a reference to the classic suspense film.

Wendy Walraven will direct the giddy, fleet fantasy based on the love between, and adventures of, the brother and sister. Also involved are Julianna Haubrich (Set Design) by and Julie Seite (Lighting Design).

The play will run June 18, 19, 24, 25 and 26 at 8 p.m. and Sunday June 20th at 2 p.m. Tickets are $10 for students, $15 for seniors and $20 for adults. Thursday June 24 is community pay what you can night. For reservations please call the box office at 413-663-3240 or go to mainstreetstage.org and click on reservations. Main Street Stage advises that since this show contains adult subject matter it is not suitable for children.

The playwright, Paula Vogel has continued to write provocative plays.

How I Learned to Drive had its debut in 1997. In this play about child molestation, a country girl is abused by her uncle, who is not treated as a monster but as a man who is clearly in love with his niece. Critics point out that Vogel is writing as much about how human beings manipulate each other as she is about a sex crime. Her subtle, perfectly pitched dialogue wins her play the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Washington, D.C.-born playwright’s previous works include The Oldest Profession (1990), and Hot ‘n’ Throbbing (1993).

In 1999 she wrote And Baby Makes Seven. Vogel takes gay and lesbian literature to a new level of comedy and melancholy in this play about a lesbian couple and a gay male who parent one actual child and indulge in the fantasy of raising three more. The real and fantasy children are emblematic of the characters’ reactions to reality and their desire to dream of a world less prejudiced and more open to possibility than the one they inhabit.

In 2003, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival created an annual “Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting” for “the best student-written play that celebrates diversity and encourages tolerance while exploring issues of dis-empowered voices not traditionally considered mainstream.”