IT is a sweaty afternoon in the tiny Silver Lake theater where director Michael Kearns is rehearsing actors Dean Howell and Joe Gill. The concentration is intense on the small stage as the performers reenact a phone call between two lonely men in 1985 San Francisco.
Looking outward but never at each other, they traverse fantasy and reality, trying desperately to connect across the void. Some moments are erotic, others emotionally fraught. Yet it is all subject to scrutiny, as Kearns seeks to draw out the details and nuances that will make the fictional relationship seem real.
"Do you think he specifically called while you were at work, so he could get a machine?" Kearns asks. "When do you stop working? In '85, people worked right up until the end."
The end, in this context, means death from complications due to AIDS. And the play these men are rehearsing, Robert Chesley's "Jerker, or the Helping Hand," is arguably one of the most provocative dramas ever to grapple with that topic. It is also one of the most enduring. The 20th anniversary staging of "Jerker" will be performed at Highways next Friday and Saturday and at Moving Arts the following two weekends.
Kearns staged the play's 1986 world premiere at Los Angeles' Celebration Theatre. Shortly after that, the play was thrown into the national spotlight -- and controversy -- when radio station KPFK-FM aired a late-night broadcast of excerpts of the performance. That provoked a fundamentalist who complained to the Federal Communications Commission.
Kearns himself was tested for the AIDS virus in 1989 and, in the wake of actor Brad Davis' death in 1991, announced in an NBC interview that he was HIV-positive.
And so for Kearns, the 20th anniversary of "Jerker" is as much a personal landmark as one for the activist theater with which he has long been closely tied. "I wanted to do the 20th anniversary production because I can," says the Goodman Theatre-trained actor-writer-director, who also performed with original cast member David Stebbins in 1988.
"When I did the first production in 1986, there was no way that I thought I'd direct a 10th-year anniversary and, although somewhat more optimistic, part of me didn't think I'd be around to direct the 20th," Kearns continues. "As I face the third round, it is with fresh sadness, respect and excitement."
