"After spending more than a decade in a clumsy tango with my fringe career and my mainstream career, AIDS erupted: the catalyst for me to define myself and begin a journey to achieving an artistry that would resound beyond the soundstages and backlots of Hollywood, embracing a world full of infinite stories."
Michael Kearns
In
The Drama of AIDS: My Lasting Connection with Two Plays That Survived the Plague,
weaves a remarkable tapestry that casts the theatre as a metaphor for how life unfolds in ways that are both beautiful and theatrical. Kearns shares the real, uncensored story of his intimate relationship with two plays-James Carroll Pickett's
Dream Man
and Robert Chesley's
Jerker
-a relationship that has spanned more than twenty years.
First and foremost,
Kearns
writes about the theatre and its transformative powers. His is a book about putting on a show; it is a book about loss and love; it is a book about being an openly gay and publicly HIV-positive artist during the years when AIDS has unabatedly affected the world stage, literally and figuratively. It is a book about the brotherhood that the theatre engenders.
The Drama of AIDS
is also about immortality; how memory lives in the theatre and can be gracefully passed from one generation to another. About life in the theatre-and life, period.