Michael Kearns: Becoming – Triptych in Reds
Michael Kearns
Michael Kearns’ artist-activist stance has been internationally on view and lauded for more than four decades. Produced throughout in America, Europe and Australia throughout the 80s and 90s, the solo performance that put Kearns on the map was intimacies, an exploration of marginalized populations who contracted HIV. His openness as a gay man with HIV has driven much of his drama, onstage and off, including the adoption of an African-American baby in 1995. Kearns lives in Los Angeles with his daughter, Tia, and continues to theatrically depict AIDS as well as other socially-relevant art.
Kearns as Tennessee
Kearns as Big Red, intimacies
Becoming Tennessee (In Red)
I scoured the thrift shops
Looking for the perfect sport coat
Maybe checkered black and white
Or jazzy plaid of multi-colors
How to capture Mr. Tennessee
Williams’ unbridled persona
His black depression
His Southern gentility
His shadowed humor
The costume helps this actor find
The character
Informs my movement
Fabric on skin
Provides me with voice
Gestures that invoke his spirit
His languidness, that luscious drawl
A pair of polyester pants
Vintage (at least fifty years old)
Seduce me from the hanger
“I’ll transform you into
Your playwright hero”
They shouted in their entire ruby
Redness
Not the color of a clown’s nose
Or a politician’s tie
Clara Bow’s cupid lips
Or the Pope’s designer pumps
The red of burns
Bloodshot eyes
As crimson as a king’s royal robe
Perhaps the shade of Blanche’s lipstick
On Stanley’s neck
Or the dried blood
On Sebastian’s chest
Maybe the color of Brick’s bruises
But not the blue of Laura’s roses
The magical pants
Encase my thighs
Hug my balls
Nestle my cock
Say hello to my butt
Inspire my gait
Beating beneath his heart
Below his belt buckle
That fecund area
Is the decoder of Williams’
Roughed up spirit
Either of us
Growing up in St. Louis
In the Twentieth Century
Could have been stomped
To death
Simply for sporting those
Blatant (sissy) pants
Tenn, baby
Big brother
Big Daddy
I want to bequeath you
One-hundred red roses
Thousands of petals
Falling at your feet
As we walk the red carpet
In our hot hot trousers
Showing off our true colors
Becoming Camille
“That’s my daddy”
My daughter announces
To her teenage girlfriends
With both pride and defiance
Pointing to the painting that
Occupies what seems like a city block
Of wallspace in my bedroom
The artwork is obstreperously
Extravagant
The colors so voluptuous
One almost senses
The paint still wet
The startling red of the voluminous dress
With lacey elbow-length gloves
And wet luscious lips
Ignore the hint of an Adam’s apple
Look instead at her anguished eyes
Masterfully crafted by the brushes
Of a makeup man, then a painter
And filled in by the actor’s
Fevered identification
With the character
He’s portraying
Daddy is Camille
–playing Camille that is–
The florid whore of
Charles Ludlam’s parody
Every inch a tragic diva
(Including the mannish hands)
But it’s Camille’s flushed heart
I needed to transplant into
My male body
In order to become her
I required an alchemic blood transfusion
For her deathbed scene
When the delicately rouged
Cheekbones of the painting
Had been erased
And replaced by hallowed cheeks
Of the doomed
Like the men I’d held
Who died of AIDS
Whose beauty was short-lived
In spite of being immortalized
In dramatic paintings
On slinky celluloid
Or both
I must be able to
Spit up Camille’s blood
(Or was it mine?
Or was it fake?)
–the rubicund color of
roses and cherries—
Into a flimsy handkerchief
Bleached snow white
Tia didn’t tell her friends
(Or did she?)
That her daddy also has infected blood
To match the color of
Camille’s gown afire
Becoming The Other
The silken scarf
Originally dirty white
Dyed red by the blond costumer
Who worked on Star Trek
At Paramount
Who was in my aerobics class
Negative, I believe
(HIV, that is)
Late eighties
When AIDS was an off color
Guessing game
Not quite out of the closet
More black and white
Than primary colors
My menagerie of misfits
Would transition from
The page to the stage
With the help of only
One shared costume piece:
The red scarf
Dyed by the muscular
Anglo-Saxon sexpot
Who worked on the Hollywood lot
It is an off-red
You might say
Not the red of The Red Shoes
Or the cloak of Red Riding Hood
My scarf was the red of
Burgundy
The color of wine
Known to alter personality
I wrapped it around
My head
And it became the luxurious mane
Of streetwalker extraordinaire
Big Red (“named after my hair”)
Whose tresses “fell out by the handful”
After chemotherapy
There was Mike
A hemophiliac
Routinely enwrapped
In blood-soaked bandages
I wrapped it around
My eyes
To convey the blinding CMV
(Cytomegalovirus)
Homeless Phoenix
(“named after the city, not the bird”)
Endured in tandem with the DTs
The priest
Wore the scarf
—gracefully, almost theatrically—
Say it: femininely
Around his neck
Strangling his Catholicism
With the vestment
Only one of father’s many lies
Wrapped around the waist
Of the flamenco dancer
The scarf caught fire
When he stomped the floor
As the flaming madness of dementia
Overtook him
“It’s like the scarlet letter”
The butch brother of Joe
(A boyfriend of mine
Who died of AIDS)
Said to me
After a show in Chicago
Like AIDS
The scarf’s color has faded a bit
But not lost its myriad meanings
Always reminding me of
Others
Read more from Michael here on his website which includes links to various article
