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DRAMA OF AIDS
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KEARNS TOURS AMERICA WITH NEW BOOK
AND TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY PRODUCTIONThe Acclaimed Artist-Activist Honors World AIDS Day
Artist-activist Michael Kearns will honor World AIDS Day, December 1, 2009, with an American tour that will introduce a new book and revive a groundbreaking theat repiece that he wrote and performed twenty years ago.
On Sunday, October 25, Kearns will read from The Drama of AIDS: My Lasting Connections with Two Plays that Survived the Plague, his sixth book from Heinemann. The Drama of AIDS, with a foreword by Tim Miller, is a memoir that chronicles Kearns’ impassioned connections to Robert Chesley’s Jerker and James Carroll Pickett’s Dream Man. The kick-off reading will be held at Skylight Books in Los Feliz.
Kearns will immediately embark on a 20th anniversary tour of intimacies, a play that premiered in 1989, beginning at Wings Theatre in New York for a one-night only performance on Thursday, October 29. The artist will immediately return to Los Angeles for a series of special Monday night performances in November (2nd, 9th, 16th, and 30th) at the intimate drkrm.gallery in anticipation of the tour’s centerpiece event at the University of Southern California on World AIDS Day.
In 1989, Kearns’ solo performance piece in which he plays six wildly divergent characters who are urgently affected by HIV/AIDS was a landmark theatrical event. “By Aristotle’s standards, AIDS is to classical tragedy what nuclear warheads are to skeet-shooting,” wrote the LA Weekly, “an unwieldy subject that has beggared the best-intended of imaginations and generated a whole genre of trivializing, tear-jerking stage melodramas. Not so with this accomplished evening of AIDS portraits by actor/writer
Michael Kearns. Kearns’ carefully observed monologues achieve a balance of sympathy (without manipulating sentiment), humor and quiet heroism that communicates its personal struggles without losing sense of the larger social and political qualifiers.”
Produced in part with a grant from Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, this East Coast performance marks a reprise of intimacies at Wings in the West Village; the show first played there in the early nineties.
The southern part of America is the next stop on the tour: The ArtsCenter in Carrboro, North Carolina, with performances on Friday and Saturday, November 13 and 14.
On Friday, November 20, Kearns will return to his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, being produced by the Uppity Theatre Company at a theatre to be announced.
Chicago is next up with a special performance on Sunday, November 22, at the Victory Gardens Fresh Squeezed queer Icons Series 2009/10.
As World AIDS Day approached, Kearns will return to Los Angeles, “the place where all of this material was birthed,” he says, referring to Dream Man, Jerker, and intimacies: the three plays that are the focus of the tour.
On December 1, Kearns will perform intimacies at the Ground Zero Performance Café on the campus of the University of Southern California.
The following night, December 2, EZTV’s film adaptation of Dream Man will be the centerpiece of “The Drama of AIDS,” an evening that will also feature readings from Kearns’ book and a display from the AIDS Quilt. Jimmy Shaw, who stars in the film, will also appear.
Kearns will return to the East Coast on Friday and Saturday, December 4 and 5, appearing at the Actors Studio of Newburyport in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
For more than three decades, Michael Kearns has been a fixture in the world of art and politics. His prodigious AIDS-related work as an artist-activist is unparalleled.
Kearns came out as Hollywood’s first openly gay actor in the mid-seventies, followed by a public stance about his positive HIV-status, which he revealed on Entertainment Tonight in 1991.In addition to issues surrounding HIV/AIDS, homophobia, and the GLBT agenda, Kearns has devoted himself to fundraising and creating art that addresses addiction, homelessness, and mental illness.Beginning in the early eighties, Kearns’ outpourings chronicling the HIV/AIDS crisis have never abated, generating a virtual library of material. Co-founder and Artistic Director of Artists Confronting AIDS (1984—1994), his early leadership instincts also resulted in the Southland Theatre Artists Goodwill event, an annual AIDS fundraiser that recently celebrated its 25th year. His solo theatre pieces depicting the plague, beginning in 1989 with intimacies, have been performed nationally and abroad.
Other theatrical work, written and performed by Kearns, includes more intimacies, Rock, Make Love Not War, Attachments, Complications and Going In: Once Upon A Time In South Africa. He has also written numerous full-length produced plays (Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?, Myron, and off) in addition to five theatre books that include T-Cells & Sympathy and Acting = Life.
While maintaining a mainstream television and film career, appearing in a number of plotlines depicting HIV/AIDS (Life Goes On, Beverly Hills 90210, A Mother’s Prayer, A River Made To Drown In), Kearns also co-wrote the indie film, Nine Lives, in which he also appears.
He lives in Los Angeles with his daughter, Tia, a fifteen-year old who attends the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.
Sunday, October 25 @ 5:00
Book Launch Party, The Drama of AIDS: My Lasting Connections with Two Plays That Survived the Plague, Skylight Books, 1818 North Vermont, Los Feliz, California, www.skylightbooks.com, 323 661 1175.
Thursday, October 29 @ 8:00
The premiere of the twentieth anniversary production of intimacies, Wings Theatre, 154 Christopher Street, New York City, www.wingstheatre.com, 212 627 2961.Mondays, November 2, 9, 16, 30
These four intimate events will be held at the drkrm.gallery in a unique setting, 2121 San Fernando Road, Eagle Rock, California, http://www.drkrm.com/about.html, 323 223 6867.November 13, 14 @ 8:00
Intimacies, presented by the Carrboro The ArtsCenter, in Carrboro, North Carolina, 300-G East Main Street, www.artscenterlive.org, (919) 929 2787, ext. 201.November 20 @ 8:00
The artist-activist can go home again: That Uppity Theatre Company presents at a St. Louis location to be announced, www.uppityco.com, 314 995 4600.November 22 @ 7:30
As part of the Victory Gardens Fresh squeezed Queer Icons Series 2009/10, intimacies at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre, 2433 N Lincoln, Chicago, www.victorygardens.org/content, 773 871 3000.December 1 @ 7:00
The World AIDS Day performance of intimacies at the Ground Zero Performance Café on the campus of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles,
http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/visionsandvoices/assets/docs/VV_0910_Brochure.pdf
December 2 @ 7:30
“The Drama of AIDS,” One Institute, a celebration of World AIDS Day, featuring the premiere of EZTV’s Dream Man and readings from Kearns’ book in tandem with an exhibit from the AIDS Quilt. Donations accepted to benefit ONE’s AIDS History Project, 909 West Adams, Los Angeles, www.onearchives.org, 213 741 0094.December 4, 5 @ 8:00
The Actors Studio of Newburyport at the Tannery presents intimacies, 50 Water St. Mill #1, Studio #5, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, www.newburyportacting.org, 978 465 1229.
©2004 Michael Kearns Designed and maintained by tonyontheweb.com