IF YOU GO
What:Beirut by Alan BowneWhere: Sol Theatre Project, 1140 N. Flagler Dr., Fort Lauderdale, through May 2When: 8 p.m. Wednesday and Friday (runs in repertory with Yasmina Reza's Art, performed at 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday)Cost: $20 Wednesday, $25 FridayInfo: 954-801-9207 or www.soltheatre.comAlan Bowne wrote Beirut, a play about government repression in the wake of a sexually transmitted disease, in 1987. In the raw, two-character drama, Bowne never calls the killer illness AIDS, but his subject is abundantly clear. It was AIDS that took Bowne's life when he was just 44, only two years after Beirut debuted.
For the next month, in repertory with the far more mainstream Art, Fort Lauderdale's Sol Theatre Project is taking the adventurous faction of its audience to ''Beirut,'' a place that has nothing to do with Lebanon.
Bowne's Beirut is a grim internment camp on Manhattan's Lower East Side, home to people who have tested positive for the rampaging disease. The imprisoned are identified by a ''P'' tattooed on one butt cheek or the other, depending on their gender. The mark isn't just an easy way for ''negatives'' to spot ''positives'' and avoid risky sex; it is, instead, a way to round up and isolate the afflicted, who risk capital punishment if they defy the law.
This isn't the first time Beirut has been produced in South Florida. A now-defunct small company did it on Miami Beach just a month before Bowne died, at a time when AIDS was far more likely to be a death sentence than it is today. Yet for different reasons, Sol's Beirut is a resonant, visceral experience.
Bowne draws us into this imagined world, in a not-so-distant future, through the conflicting desires of would-be lovers.
Torch (Todd Bruno) is the positive one, a man locked away in a stark place with only some bottled water, canned food and erotic memories for company. The woman who haunts his dreams and fuels his fantasies is Blue (Julia Clearwood), a ''negative'' who was getting ready to sleep with him when he was hauled off.
Suddenly, after Torch moans his way through an autoerotic experience, a breathless Blue turns up. She has worked her way past guards, past the corpses of six defiant ''positives'' hung from lamp posts, to rejoin Torch. And she has a plan: She wants to have sex, so she can live and die with him, on her own terms.
Here, Bowne isn't anticipating today's ''bugchasers.'' He is giving his characters life-and-death stakes, a conflict that propels both tension and dangerous erotic yearning throughout the 75-minute play.
Director Robert Hooker and the actors handle the demands of the script, which include loads of vulgar language, verbal and physical violence, and flashes of nudity, skillfully enough that Bowne's direly imagined future becomes as compelling as it is disturbing.
What Bowne did anticipate is more in the Orwellian spirit of 1984: a country in which people can be held without charges or trials; a government that puts cameras everywhere, to observe its citizens even in their most private and intimate moments. Treating HIV and AIDS has become easier since Bowne wrote Beirut. Safeguarding civil liberties? Not so much.
Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.
