Michael Kearns Shines in "intimacies"

BY: COLIN MURPHY - SENIOR WRITER

    The audience at the Metropolitan Community Church of Greater St. Louis (MCCGSL) was treated to a rare evening of entertainment as Michael Kearns returned to his hometown to perform his one-man-show, intimacies presented by That Uppity Theatre Company, Joan Lipkin, Artistic Director.

    Indeed, the evening was part homecoming, part reunion as two decades have passed since Kearns' intimacies and That Uppity Theatre Company, both of which are celebrating their 20th anniversary, first collaborated in the Lou. 

   The Gateway Men's Chorus opened up the evening with a medley of songs, including a snazzy number dedicated to gay St. Louis.

    Kearns then took to the stage, which was bare, save a single white chair and end table. Carefully picking up his signature red scarf, he tied it around his waist, and was immediatly transformed into Fernando, the Latin fan dancer.

   In intimacies, Kearns portrays six different characters all impacted by AIDS. The venerable actor commands each persona, slipping with ease from one to the next through the use of a single scarf and immense talent.

   All of the characters, with the exception of Marilyn Monroe (or is it the ghost of Marilyn Monroe?), are dying of AIDS. They were written in the 1980s, years before the arrival of life-saving drugs, and each struggle with lesions and pain and stigma and certain death.

   Kearns is powerful and unapologitic in laying bare the emotions of characters like Big Red, a prostitute who has to deal with the horror that she has passed the illness to her infant daughter. The actor shines as Father Anthony, the golden child of Italian American parents who cares for his disowned and dying, gay-twin-brother all the while harboring his own, dark secret.

   When I interviewed Kearns earlier this month in anticipation of intimacies, Hollywood's first openly gay and openly HIV-positive actor said that he wanted to portray the marginalized and invisible people affected and infected with AIDS.

Indeed, his one-man-show does just that and in the process takes the audience on a roller coaster  of emotion in conjoring forth the pain, the humor and unexpected vulnerabilities of a sextet of compelling characters.

intimacies was produced in partnership with Doorways, St. Louis Effort for AIDS, Food Outreach, Gateway Men's Chorus, MCCGSL, Project ARK and Show ME No Hate.

You can email Colin Murphy at colin_murphy@sbcglobal.net