Stage

...Its power is inherent in its subject matter...

...I did not understand this device when he introduced it in the first number of the show, but I do know that, as he uses it in Closer, it adds urgency to a short piece that mixes music, nonverbal sound, and words...

...When he reaches the front of the stage, he gets to zero, and then pointing to himself—"one"—he begins to count the members of the audience...

...STAGE FINAL ACTS 'WALTZ,' 'HOME,' & 'CLOSER' aula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz, which played at the Circle Repertory earlier this year, must be the funniest AIDS play ever written—which does not mean that it is not an extremely moving one...

...Anna's trip becomes one sexual adventure after another (in the time of your life, live, as Saroyan said in a much more innocent play), and Carl's becomes a mixture of art appreciation and international intrigue...

...Cherry Jones's presence on stage kept the blemishes at bay...

...Given these circumstances, one might expect a maudlin mixture of sentimentality and guilt, but Vogel shares her brother's oblique humor, and the tears, when they come (and they did come in the theater the night I was there), force their way through the broad comedy...

...There is one other character, the Third Man (one scene is a parody of the ferris wheel sequence from the Carol Reed movie), who is the doctor and everyone they meet in Europe...

...Strangelove bit in which one hand fights the other for the flask of Anna's urine which he wants to drink...

...Cherry Jones, as Anna, gave one of the most incredible performances I have seen in recent years...

...That journey—Anna's response to her brother's illness—begins with a preposterous transference in which she becomes the one suffering from the fatal disease—ATD (Acquired Toilet Disease), "an affliction, so far, of single schoolteachers" who get it from the toilet seats in their schools...

...West's protagonist is Wendal, a bisexual jazz musician who finally accepts that he has AIDS, and goes home presumably because he shares the belief of Robert Frost's hired man that "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in...

...The play is available in print and will certainly have other performances, but the one at the Circle Rep was remarkable...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Froot is a performance artist who plays a saxophone (I guess from the sound and the look of the keys that it is a saxophone although it is long and uncurved like a clarinet), and who lets go of the mouthpiece to grunt and bark and make strange sounds...

...Tucked into the program and printed with the play in American Theatre (September 1991) is a letter from Vogel's brother, who died of AIDS in 1988, and the play ("To the memory of Carl—because I cannot sew") is a fantasy European trip which a brother (Carl) and a sister (Anna) share—a substitute for the trip that the playwright did not take with her brother in 1986...

...A lovely finish, but one that does not let the audience forget that this is The Baltimore Waltz...

...Vogel's play is a good one but looking at it on the page or recollecting it in tranquillity, one begins to see the things that do not quite work--or ought not to...

...A cold coming he had of it, as another poet almost said...

...His mother, who has always made-over him, sees her house poisoned, as much by his homosexuality as by his sickness, and simply moves out...

...Vogel has a taste for odd images—sometimes gross ones...

...a workable performance by Joe Mantello as the Third Man and a very attractive one by Richard Thompson as Carl—all these could have come together to make effective theater of Vogel's play...

...Only his father, with whom he has had a running fight over the life he leads, stays with him, nurses him, mourns his death...

...122 Field Trips...

...Todesrocheln, who is rumored to have a cure, does a Dr...

...His brother, although sympathetic, turns away, as though Wendal may somehow infect his planned marriage...

...Loy Arcenas's minimally furnished set, with a couch that could be converted to whatever the scene required...

...The "our" in the quotation is the black community and the denial is the insistence, despite growing statistics, that AIDS is a gay white disease that has nothing to do with blacks...

...Within a single scene, often within a single speech, she could slide from rough comedy to sharp-edged pathos with such apparent ease that the audience hardly knew what was happening until the laugh in the throat turned into a catch...

...Carl and the other man in a trench coat flash teddy bears at one another, the secret signal of spies and homosexuals (perhaps undercover agents in either case...

...One of the most unusual and most effective AIDS pieces I have seen is Dan Froot's Closer, which he performed recently at Philadelphia's Movement Theatre International as part of one of the P.S...

...For the most part, the rest of the play consists of realistic scenes—sometimes short ones as in a television play—and the play comes across as a conventional family crisis drama which makes and then underlines its points...

...f The Baltimore Waltz is about trying not to know what one knows, Cheryl L. West's Before It Hits Home at the Public Theater is a much more direct attack on "our historical problems with denial," as West said in the Village Voice (February 19, 1992...

...Carl is revealed in the uniform of a nineteenthcentury Austrian officer and he and Anna dance offstage to a Strauss waltz...

...Anne Bogart's uncluttered direction which stuck close to Vogel's text...

...His aunt keeps her distance and his son will not come near him...

...He stands at the back of the stage and, after speeches that make clear that his friend is dying of AIDS, he alternates playing his horn, barking, and calling out numbers that descend as he moves forward...

...But there was more to it than that...

...Even at this point, reality does not hold...

...Even though Vogel is not one for conventional exposition, she manages to establish Carl's disease in the first scene, to provide the unrealistic but very real base (the hospital in Baltimore) from which the imaginary journey emerges...

...This movement from the falling T-cell count to the growing number of possible victims is devastating...

...Closer is closer than most performance arts pieces ever get...

...One of the best scenes is one in which Wendal plays in two spaces at once, telling his male lover and proving unable to tell his female lover that he has AIDS...

...The AIDS analogies keep surfacing in the most unlikely places, preparing for the final return to the hospital and Carl's death...

...The Dutch boy who saved Holland by putting his finger 18: 24 April 1992 Commonweal in the dike has become a fifty-year-old in wooden shoes and a Buster Brown haircut who services female tourists...