THE BALTIMORE WALTZ, Ulysses Theater Company, at Shattered Globe Theatre. Paula Vogel’s 80-minute one-act–a quirky 1991 tribute to a brother who died of AIDS–keeps tragedy at arm’s length until its abrupt and haunting ending. With a kind of gallows humor, Vogel changes their fates: Anna, a Baltimore schoolteacher, imagines that she’s suffering from incurable “Acquired Toilet Disease” and that she accompanies her brother Carl, a gay San Francisco librarian, on the journey that he was well enough to plan but not to take. On Anna’s literal guilt trip to Europe, the fantasy turns into film noir a la The Third Man: a randy patient searching for a quack cure, Anna encounters various European stereotypes–a smooth French waiter, the little Dutch boy who saved Holland, a leftist German radical. Carl prefers to visit the art museums.
