"Time Capsule: Rediscovered Performances from the Epidemic (1989- 1994)"

About Face Theatre 8 tonight At Jane Addams Hull House, 3212 N.Broadway Tickets, $10. (773) 549-7943 Recommended

For those who spent the early years of the AIDS epidemic nursing -and losing - their friends, much of the special World AIDS Daybenefit at About Face Theatre will seem an eerie flashback.

Memories of a time when daily visits to the hospital followed theend of the workday, when families - biological and chosen -fractured, and when fear was more contagious than the virus itselfflood the mind during this 80-minute set of theater pieces.

For those who were spared such experiences, "Time Capsule:Rediscovered Performances from the Epidemic (1989-1994)" might seem areport from a distant planet.

Today AIDS in America conjures up pharmaceutical ads, trips to thehealth club and fund-raising bicycle marathons.

"Time Capsule," conceived by Carl Hippensteel and directed by himand Greg Copeland, gets to these thorny issues after a brief falsestart.

Lisa Cordes' "The Things We Knew About Time or Tim or Both" is anexample of the sort of New Age blather that sees something good, evenspiritual, coming out of this dread disease and the many young mengone.

Doran Schrantz, Patricia Kane and Judith Hoppe do better than thispiece deserves over the live Philip Glass-like music of Soren Koneckyand Marci Nettles.

Sean Ewert performs three essays from the biting AIDS humorist,the late David B. Feinberg ending powerfully with a persuasive caseagainst the usual end-of-life "no regrets" bromides.

"Bad Dream" by Craig Lucas (1992) still rings true with its lookat a pair of lovers, one infected by the virus, one not, and theirattempts to impose normalcy on a situation both impossible andinescapable. Gary Alexander, as the "healthy" worrier, and MichaelReyes, as his stoical "sick" boyfriend, act as naturally as two menbreathing.

The 1989 "Rosen's Son" by Joe Pintauro is the most gut-wrenchingwork, as an elderly Holocaust survivor (a fine turn by JerryRazowsky) bursts into the apartment of his dead son's lover (CraigBryant) to confront him for his seeming lack of memory.

But it is the somewhat sprawling half-hour closer, VictorBumbalo's 1991 "Tell" that re-creates most keenly the most brutalside of AIDS' psychological toll.

The ever-marvelous Derek Hasenstab is a hospital patient whodepends on the stories of a visiting friend (the insightful BrianGoodman) to remind him of the sexual uses of his ravaged body.

Before the script drifts too much towards the story of anintrusive, self-involved nurse (valiantly played by Kane), it's apowerful demonstration of how this disease robbed its targets firstof their futures, then of their presents and, ultimately, even oftheir pasts.