Circle of Fifths is a story of harmony and dissonance, theme and counter-theme: love and hate, trust and betrayal, truth and deceit. The setting is contemporary New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, but in the world of the play great composers return from beyond the grave to give advice to the living, who struggle to create their own surrogate families within the community of other artists, as they all scramble to maintain the fires of creativity amidst the harsh demands and disappointments of daily life. Claire is a composer living with her painter boyfriend, Daniel. Her best friends Bruce and Geoffrey live upstairs; Bruce, a Chinese-American puppeteer, is dying of AIDs. Geoffrey, his African-American boyfriend, has just landed the role of Mercutio in a production of Romeo and Juliet. In spite of Claire’s advice, Bruce is hiding the severity of his condition from Geoffrey. Claire has been commissioned to write a requiem, but she is having a creative block when her favorite composer appears to help out – Ludwig van Beethoven. He is soon joined by Bach, but the two of them cannot agree about anything, and hurl insults at one another, almost coming to blows. Her life is further complicated by the unexpected arrival of her estranged sister, who proceeds to have sex with the dying (and infected) Bruce. As Claire says, music is about relationships – as in a circle of fifths, when the journey begins and ends at home, but not before travelling through every note of the twelve-tone scale. Each character in the play becomes the subject of his or her own sub-plot as the story cycles through their intertwining lives. Thus the structure of the play parallels its musical title, as the characters search for meaning buried in suffering and art, and find that even death can offer hope of reconciliation and redemption.