KENT, Ohio — An epidemic that fills coffin after coffin with people in their 20s. Activist-minded theatermakers who work furiously between funerals to bring the tragedy to life onstage. Audience members who express fear that if nothing changes, they or someone they love will be gone soon, too.

For those who remember New York during the AIDS crisis, these scenes conjure heartbreaking memories of attending memorial services for friends and lovers and then watching new plays like “Angels in America” and “The Normal Heart” through tears. Yet, increasingly for many people across Ohio and nationwide, the theater world’s response to an emergency health crisis isn’t history — it’s happening. The killer this time isn’t H.I.V. It’s heroin.

“In the Rust Belt, it’s a situation where everybody’s heard about it and everybody knows it’s a crisis,” said Nathan Motta, the artistic director of the Dobama Theater in Cleveland Heights. “Everybody is one or two people from somebody who is suffering.”

At least five plays about heroin abuse have been produced in northeast Ohio alone in the last year as the state’s residents grapple with the surging epidemic. The Columbus Dispatch reported in May that at least 4,149 Ohioans died from unintentional overdoses of heroin, fentanyl and other drugs in 2016, a 36 percent jump from the prior year. This year’s overdose fatalities are set to outpace last year’s, according to the report.