drkrm.gallery, and now, performance space, will present four very special Monday night performances of Michael Kearns' landmark theatrical piece intimacies. An intimate event in anticipation of World AIDS Day 2009. Limited Engagement/Limited Seats/Unlimited Ferocity.

20 years ago, Michael Kearns wrote and first performed the landmark theatrical piece: intimacies. A panoply of characters who speak with abandon, intimacies is theatre that promises to rock you. Meet Fernando, a macho flamenco dancer; Big Red, a black female street hooker; Patrick, a Hollywood pretty boy; Phoenix, a homeless man living under the freeway; Marilyn as is Monroe; Father Anthony, a Catholic priest who confesses and then some.

REVIEW: In Intimacies, Michael Kearns Delivers Scathing Soliloquies Against the Scourge of AIDS by Alan R. Hall

click here for a preview of Michael Kearns' intimacies

Kearns premiered intimacies to unanimous critical acclaim. “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.”

“The lower case lettering on intimacies is not an affectation. It’s a signal, like a tap on a window pane, that the lives dramatized here are uncomfortably private matters. You watch these characters like a voyeur who comes away not sullied but purified…Kearns’ only props are a stool and a red scarf. His vocal dexterity and varied personas don’t rely on costume changes. The austerity of pain, you might call it…The opening character monologue about a Mexican flamenco dancer, a man conditioned to conquer the ladies but who discovers he’s gay, is devastating in its erotic squalor.” LOS ANGELES TIMES

“In a tour de force impersonation, Kearns is Marilyn Monroe, who compares the lies she was forced to embody with the hypocrisy and homophobia that infected Hudson’s life and career.” CHICAGO READER

“Perfect Patrick from West Hollywood, is a morbidly self-absorbed loner who insists he’s simply too gorgeous to be dying.” EDGE MAGAZINE

“Father Anthony provides a scathing attack on the Catholic church’s hypocritical and murderous policies regarding the epidemic.” SAN DIEGO UPDATE

“With a simple change of light and an adjustment of the red scarf, Kearns becomes Big Red, a female prostitute. Big Red has no anger, looking back on her life as if reading a road map. Her uncle abused her. Her mother permitted it. That’s life. She’s a pragmatist. What kind of world, she wonders, does not punish a mother like her own, yet allows an innocent child to get such a disease? No matter. Big Red must go on.” DAILY VARIETY

“Phoenix, a stoic ex-con who discovers life and love even on the eve of his death. Behind the different faces, Kearns demonstrates that the real tragedy of AIDS is not a particular lifestyle, set of values or beliefs, but rather a simple indifference to the fundamental humanity implicit in the suffering around us.” LA WEEKLY


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. 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, and Complications. 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. As a director, he has collaborated on several world premieres, including Robert Chesley’s Jerker in 1987, followed by revivals in 1997 and 2007.

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 Nine Lives in which he also appears. The recipient of numerous artistic and humanitarian awards, Kearns lives in Los Angeles with his fifteen-year old daughter, Tia.

His most recent work, Going In: Once Upon A Time In South Africa, is a spoken memoir that also features the photography of Tia Kearns. Going In was recently produced by the City of West Hollywood, Spoken Interludes and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. 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. In the fall of 2009, his newest book, The Drama of AIDS, My Lasting Connections With Two Plays That Survived the Plague, chronicles his artistic connections, spanning more than twenty years with Jerker and Dream Man. He will also perform a 20th anniversary production of intimacies at USC in Los Angeles and in cities throughout America.

PR CONTACT: Jay Lopez 213.595.7419
jay@jaylopez.net

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