Emmy winner Jim Parsons was a freshman in college when he was introduced to playwright Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz. In that play, a sister imagines the European odyssey she’d have made with her terminally ill brother, Carl, as she keeps vigil at his hospital bedside. The piece was, in part, the playwright’s love letter to her brother, Carl Vogel, who died of complications from AIDS in 1988. In the dedication she wrote, “To the memory of Carl — because I cannot sew,” a nod to the panels of fabric people created for the AIDS Memorial Quilt in honor of loved ones they lost.
“There’s a magic about []. It’s kind of a fairy tale in the way it lays out,” says Parsons. “[I] was
