Actually, according to a recent piece on Bloomberg.com, Lucas didn't set out to write an AIDS metaphor:
Frank Rich, in his 1990 rave for ``Prelude' (the original production starred the late Barnard Hughes as the old man and Alec Baldwin and Mary-Louise Parker as the young couple) called the play a metaphor for AIDS, as the young woman suddenly finds herself in an old person's withering flesh. In a telephone interview, Lucas, a chatty 55-year-old, said that wasn't his intention. When he wrote the play, he said he was involved with a man who was closed off. Lucas wanted to explore the elusiveness of truly knowing another soul.
``It was the idea that I could be with someone but it wouldn't really be them, that the self is an illusion,' said Lucas, who now shares an apartment in Inwood and a house in Putnam County, New York, with the set designer John McDermott. ``It's a Buddhist idea. I had this image of being on a vacation with someone and not really knowing who they were.'
"I cried during the Frug." - MC