Beirut, a stunner about love in the plague years. Written by a man who later died of AIDS, Beirut first premiered in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. At the start of the play, it’s ‘the near future,’ we’re in a dump of a room on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where a young man named Torch has been quarantined after testing positive for a nameless disease that sounds a lot like AIDS. His girlfriend, Blue, who has not been infected, makes the dangerous journey across the quarantine line to be with him. A Romeo and Juliet of the boroughs. Only with this production, the director has cast two women.