Joan Lipkin of That Uppity Theatre Company passed this info to me yesterday, and being on deadline, I've had a hard time getting it up in a timely fashion; but it's a biggie. It's a little more than a month off, but one to mark on your calendars. Like the Iraq war, like Katrina, AIDS is a crisis that has passed out of being a case du jour, but still needs our attention. Thank goodness for artists and activists like Michael Kearns, who refuse to let us just turn away from these crises...but can still uplift, transform and amaze us with their art in the process. --Stefene Russell
Here are all the details:
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On Friday, November 20, intimacies will be performed at 8pm, at Metropolitan Community Church of Greater Saint Louis, located at 1919 S. Broadway, 63104 and produced by That Uppity Theatre Company, Joan Lipkin, Artistic Director. Lipkin produced intimacies almost twenty years ago as part of her company’s ground breaking Alternate Currents / Direct Current Series. Tickets are available at the door. All seating is general admission. Audience members may choose to pay between $10-25 to see the show and no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
This event is co-sponsored by the Metropolitan Community Church of Greater St. Louis, Doorways Interfaith AIDS Housing Program, Saint Louis Effort for AIDS, Food Outreach and Project ARK. All of these organizations will have tables with information at the event and audiences are encouraged to come early to explore the services they offer as well as volunteer opportunities.
Additionally, the Gateway Men’s Chorus, under the direction of Dr. Jeffrey Carter, will open the show.
“I am delighted to produce the St. Louis leg of the 20th anniversary of intimacies as part of That Uppity Theatre Company’s 20th anniversary as well. Michael Kearns is one of the most significant theatre artists of our time and it is wonderful that the chorus and many of the AIDS service organizations in St. Louis are working together to offer the community an optimal experience for this important event,” Lipkin said.
In 1989, intimacies, 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 a critic from 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.”
Michael Kearns’ new book:The Drama of AIDS: My Lasting Connections with Two Plays that Survived the Plague is 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. Books will be available for sale at the performance at MCCGSL.
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 LGBT 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.
For more info, see www.uppityco.com or call 314 995-4600.
