Celebrate With Caution

Celebration Theatre, during its halcyon days, was located on Hoover Street in Silver Lake, not in the land of hipsters that you are likely familiar with today but the seedier terrain of Silver Lake, home to Latinos, immigrants, and queers—oh, my—and oh, my, some Latino immigrant queers.

The theatre, about the size a small studio apartment, was actually an extension of the bus stop where passengers embarked on a trip to more glamorous Westside hotspots. We, its denizens, knew this because several times during critical board meetings, intense rehearsals, and performances that captured the collective grief of the AIDS cataclysm of the Eighties, bus riders would unwittingly arrive through a door—which the Fire Department prohibited us from locking—that stood between the bus stop bench and stage right.

“Where’s the john?” someone might ask as just an onstage character drew his final breath. “Does anybody have any change?” “When the fuck is the motherfucking bus supposed to get here, anyway?” Based on an 8 PM curtain, directors were warned in advance to create a bit of silent business as the bus screeched to a stop in front of the Celebration Theatre.

But believe me when I say that there is much to celebrate about that tiny sacred space on Hoover. Celebration Theatre had overflowing capacity to speak to a tribe of GLBT and, yes, questioning people who were finding their identity, inventing themselves and reinventing themselves during a period of mourning that we thought would never end. For many of us, it hasn’t.

 "...captured the sacred and profane marriage of sex and death, not uncommon in a plague state."

Chuck Rowland was the founder and first Artistic Director of Celebration Theatre; to preserve his name on this award is not only symbolic, it is historically correct. As Chuck grew older and frailer, he knew he’d have to let go of the baby he delivered on Hoover Street. Being chosen as his successor was one of those moments in my life that pointed to a new artistic frontier; Chuck unwittingly provided me with the physical space to introduce a form of explicit visceral expressiveness—an entwined emotional/sexual space, if you will—that was heretofore foreign to his generation.

While HIV/AIDS was tiptoeing into the consciousness of gay theatre artists, it was—as oxymoronic as it may sound—PC HIV. Chuck had undoubtedly never read a play with stage directions indicating that “the two onstage actors cum simultaneously.”).

“Pornography,” Chuck grumbled, describing Jerker, Robert Chesley’s 1986 so-called “AIDS play” that trenchantly captured the sacred and profane marriage of sex and death, not uncommon in a plague sate.

As theatrically savvy as anyone, Chuck eventually embraced the play in all its juiciness: multiple orgasms, blood pumping fantasies, and finally, the tears shed as audience members remained in their seats for some time after the final curtain fell.

The opportunity to direct Chesley’s play was the ideal artistic follow up for me after I acted in James Carroll Pickett’s Dream Man. Pickett, like Chesley, was unapologetic about profound explorations of sexuality in his work. For him, the sexual gay male body was a conduit to deep truths. Chesley and Pickett entrusted me with the daunting task of telling their stories. Stories with words that zing, words that linger, words that hurt, words that scream, words that shock, words that defined—with equal amounts of rawness and elegance—what we (gay men) were experiencing.

Kearns & Pickett, producers of STAGE,

the first and longest-running AIDS 

benefit in the country. 

I became a playwright because of Robert Chesley and James Carroll Pickett; this is their award as much as it is mine. My angel brother mentors both died of the plague but both remain seated on each side of me as I delve into the next play, the next monologue. Along with the innumerable other illegal things I did, I married each of those two men, my artist-husbands—no greater loves, no greater intimacies.

Chesley died in 1990. We held a memorial at the Hoover Street Theatre. Pickett and only one of the two surviving actors—revealingly emaciated—were among the atendees. Pickett died on July 4, 1994.

 "...I married each of these two men, my artist-husbands..."

I may have been rendered husbandless but I would not be childless. Katherine Kearns was born on August 26, 1994. My decision to adopt as a single gay man who was HIV-positive—prior to the release of the miracle protease inhibitors—resulted in reviews crueler than any given to my stage work. Many of my erstwhile supporters felt that if I survived, being a dad would certainly soften me, desexualize and depoliticize me. Ha!

Katherine, especially during the past decade—and most pointedly in the last year—has only served to expand my consciousness far beyond the concerns of being a gay man who lived through the prism of white privilege. My daughter has, in many respects, radicalized me.

The rage she experiences is fresh rage; the pain I see in her eyes is not eradicated like a “boo boo” that goes away with a smooch and a band aid. From the Ferguson furor to the gross negligence inflicted upon Sandra Bland, I am immersed in a day-to-day crash course in Black Studies. “Have you heard about the Stonewall film?” she asks, referring to the whitewashing of a queer civil rights milestone.

"...a gay man who lived through the prism of white privilege." 

The fact that we don’t share the same blood is a non-issue; the difference of our skin color is the more pervasive challenge that stirs the fresh cement of our evolving father-daughter bond. In spite of the daily turbulence that we confront in the world, a fundamental stability defines the core of our family.

Her black life matters to me more than my own white life. And I trust that her influence on me will continue to present itself in real life as well as on the page and on the stage.

Yes, we—the queers—have made inconceivable strides. But as we plan our nuptials, let us remember that there are queers of color who are routinely targeted and often murdered in cold blood; there are queers who must fight with all their muscle for Planned Parenthood, there are queer women of color who are more likely to be raped than their white counterparts; there are queers—disproportionately queers of color—who are immorally and inhumanely incarcerated; there are queers who deserve gender reassignment surgery under any circumstances—whether in the military or behind bars; there are queers—disproportionately queers of color—on Skid Row, on Death Row and at the border; there are queer men, disproportionately queers of color, who do not have access to Truvada; there are queers who are victims of this country’s lurid obsession with war. We are everywhere; not just at the wedding planners’.

Pickett (headband and whistle) with Tim Miller acting up.

And this is merely a smattering of issues that are largely American in scope; if we go global in our artistic expansiveness, there are more injustices to examine, and for playwrights—like myself (and many of you)—to explore and illuminate.

Thanks to Celebration Theatre Artistic Directors Michael Shepperd and Michael Matthews for this honor. Thanks to Mark Bringelson and his team of fearless actors who gave us so much.

And, finally, I thank each and every one of you for attending tonight and listening to my words as I endeavor to speak your particular language.

T

his speech was in acceptance of the Chuck Rowland Pioneer Award "for groundbreaking and distinguished achievement in the LGBTQ playwrighting and arts advocacy." Presented to Michael Kearns by Celebration Theatre on August 11, 2015 at the West Hollywood City Council Chambers. 

Letting Go

Letting Go

Fuck letting go.

I attended a rehearsal for the 25^th anniversary production of Robert Chesley’s Jerker, marking the first time that I haven’t been involved in a local presentation since the night of the world premiere a quarter of a century ago.. Certainly this band of ribald queers, led by impresario Glenn Kessler, doesn't need my help but I can’t let go of the play. So I’m engaged as a “consultant” which means I get to watch scattered rehearsals and—like flashbacks stored in every crevice of my consciousness—relive my intense relationship to the play’s soul: its humor, its politics, and its inescapable bed of pain.

I happened (?) to walk in during a moment in the play that Chesley and I had wrangled over. In what was a very bold choice, I wanted the two characters—who never meet in person, only over telephone lines—to break the imaginary wall between them and actually kiss, lips on lips. The brilliant playwright finally agreed to see if I could make it work. I did—so much so that the move is now a permanent part of the script. And, passing the torch, Kessler is making it work, too—stunningly.

Kessler’s approach encompasses a company of seven sexy performers; in addition to the two leads, he is incorporating a team of players who will essentially recreate—live—some of the play’s erotically-charged memory passages. What I have seen promises to illuminate the play in ways we haven’t experienced it before. This is why I had to let go.

Producer Jason Moyer and I trade publicity postcards at the rehearsal I attend (you show me yours and I’ll show you mine). His card depicts a telephone (not a cellphone, an actual eighties telephone) and spells out the full title of the play: Jerker Or The Helping Hand, A Pornographic Elegy With Redeeming Social Value And A Hymn to the Queer Men Of San Francisco In Twenty Phone Calls Many of Them Dirty. It provides the details: opening on Friday, November 4 at Space 916; get tickets at www.brownpapertickets.com.

My postcard shows the partial face of a weathered man, with his eyes closed and his silver gray bushy moustache unkempt. My new solo piece, which plays  one night only on November 30, is called Torch. This is the story a man, over sixty, who can’t seem to let go of his youth, his memories, his heat, his sexuality, his past lovers (dead and alive). But he must let go or face the last act(s) of his life as a prisoner to The Past.

The juxtaposition of these two postcards encompasses decades of theatre that speak to  the cultural phenomenon of HIV/AIDS in ways both similar and wildly divergent.

In certain respects, Torch is an emotional sequel to Jerker. The man reconnects with a lover on Facebook and they resume a convoluted romance that they had not finished four decades ago: on the Internet, instead of the telephone, they share emotional and sexual intimacies that never result in a face-to-face meeting. There’s no death in Torch other than the demise attached to letting go of inflamed memories and stumbling into old age as a gay man with HIV.

Directed by Tony Abatemarco, Torch will be presented by the Katselas Theatre Company’s INKubator along with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Tickets: 702 582 8587 or online at KTCTICKETS.COM.

More reality based and less theatrically rendered, here’s the swelling heartache: I cannot let go of my daughter. Can. Not. Let. Go. Of. My. Daughter. She has left our apartment, where we have lived since she was a baby, and is spending her junior year of high school at the Idyllwild Arts Academy, studying filmmaking. My feelings of pride are only equaled by my pangs of agony. If the “love of your life” is the person you have the deepest feelings for, the person you would die for, the person you are entangled with—emotionally and spiritually—more than anyone else, Katherine (Tia) is the love of my life.

I imagine that I hear her in her bedroom. I feel her brush up against me in the kitchen. I hear her coming home, opening the front door; my phantom daughter, haunting my dance with loneliness.  I have not lived alone for seventeen years so here I am, earlier than expected, fluttering about apprehensively in an empty nest. Not Yet. I will not let go of my daughter. But. Not Yet.

I feel like I’m on a tightrope, with the stabbing pain of neuropathy ever present, walking on tiptoe from the past into the present and terrified of the fall that’s ineluctably in my future. But I suppose it’s that fear I must let go of ultimately, right? Yah, I’ve read all those books, too.

I love the work Glenn Kessler is doing and I know Robert Chesley might have initially winced but would ultimately wallow in this newborn adaptation. Chesley worshipped sex. And the politics of sex which Kessler certainly knows how to portray with a wink and a nod—and perhaps a hard-on?—in Chesley’s direction.

I love my new piece, Torch, and all of its stingers and zingers. I love that Tony is directing me—a man who is unique but also shares so many of the qualities that my fallen brethren possessed. I am nurtured as an artist.

And, finally, I love my daughter with a passion that is unparalleled. And who can be sorry about that, even if there are periods of longing that are torturous.

That’s what life dwindles down to: what we have, what we had, what we remember, and how to let go gracefully: knowing that everything is stored in our hearts, hearts that promise to beat immortally, taking up residence in the hearts of others.