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In this production, directed by the Vortex’s Producing Artistic Director Bonnie Cullum, Torch (Matthew Patterson) has been quarantined. His healthy girlfriend Blue (Melissa Vogt-Patterson) breaks into the disease district to see him. She’s even gotten a peel-off sticker of the disease-positive tattoo, so that a guard (Gabriel Maldonado) won’t know she’s healthy. Healthy people aren’t allowed in the quarantine zone.
With Beirut’s ads proclaiming “Nudity. Sexually Explicit Material. Adults Only,” audiences might think they'll be seeing a titillating show. While there is plenty of nudity, it isn’t of the arousing sort. In this hour-long saga of love, lust and sexual deprivation, the actors (and real-life newlyweds) Patterson and Vogt-Patterson go at each other with a clawing intensity and emotional rawness that pulls you into their dark tale of doomed love. The actors are often naked, or nearly naked and intertwined, but we're looking at the dark underbelly of lust, obsession and need. There’s love, but not romance. It probably isn’t a show you’d want to see on a first date. It isn’t suggestive or racy; it’s intellectually challenging. After watching it, we felt battered and worn-out from the trauma of seeing the actors emotionally slugging away at each other.
The Vortex had their first production of Beirut in 1990, in their old Ben White space. They remounted the show in ’94. Thankfully, much has changed in the world since then, with most western AIDS patients now living longer lives. Sadly, the play still resonates as AIDS continues to ravage much of Africa and the third world. And, as author (and SXSW Interactive speaker) Steven Johnson tells us in his book, The Ghost Map (about the changes wrought by London’s 1854 Cholera epidemic), increasing urbanization and globalization have made it easier than ever for plagues to spread.
While Beirut may be a theatrical work that emerged from the era of one plague, it reminds us to consider our cultural responses to future plagues. We just hope there’s nothing to that recent report about the emergence of the flesh-eating, MRSA bacteria.... The point is, don’t dismiss Beirut as a period piece that doesn’t matter to the world now. Anyone who saw the Spanish film La Hora Fría at Fantastic Fest last year knows how an easily transmittable plague is still a going concern as a plot device, even in our era of antibiotics and antiretroviral drugs.
Go see the show, and be thankful that we’re in a temporary lull between plagues, with the time and leisure attend good theater.
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