For a generation of gay men sick of being killed, ignored, and then blamed for their own affliction, it feels like the most natural thing in the world to design a musical based off of the Scheherezade tale. The fact that it’s a musical also brings things together in an especially rageful way. The story-within-a-story of a nation struggling to tell the “story” of AIDS can’t help but be appealing. But of course, the public still wants to believe in AIDS as a kind of whodunnit, tracing back to one single “perpetrator.” The only person who can perceive him is Richard Burton, who decides to base a new exhibit in the museum around Patient Zero as a kind of “serial killer.” It takes getting to know Zero, and starting a romantic relationship with him, to change Burton’s mind. He’s been suspended somewhere between “existential limbo and the primordial void,” and now, for whatever reason, he’s back on earth, wandering around, visiting his old haunts and friends.
Burton-who also rose to infamy in the Victorian age for his translations of the Arabian Nights and experiments regarding penis size-finds himself at first dispassionately interested in the story of “Patient Zero,” until the ghost of “Zero” himself shows up.
