Attuned to art everlasting

Good art often springs from life’s creases, where planes of experience meet at odd angles and in strange, contradictory ways -- yet fold together into coherent, satisfying shapes.

In that light, one could say that Michael Kearns is caught up in trying to fashion an elaborate origami for the stage. He is curating and directing “AIDS Everlasting” at Highways Performance Space, a four-night overview of 20 years of plays, performance art, literature, song and dance that he is excerpting from the works of artists dead and living, famous and obscure, established and just emerging.

Kearns says that what’s been wrought from HIV/AIDS can be libidinously abandoned or cautionary, tragic or funny, elegiac or angry, politically pointed or just plain silly, ranging across genders and orientations. He aims to fold bits of all of it into a sequence of stage anthologies marking the annual Dec. 1 observance of World AIDS Day. His challenge, as he commands a platoon of more than 40 performers, is to make it flow artfully from moment to moment and from night to night, orchestrating contrasting moods, styles and forms to establish a sense of wholeness and progression.

Kearns is a Los Angeles-based playwright, actor, solo performer and director, most widely seen in guest spots on TV series, including “The Waltons,” “Cheers” and “Beverly Hills, 90210.” He has long been openly gay and openly HIV-positive, in defiance of the entertainment industry’s cultural and career pressures to put up disguises. Since 1984, most of his creative energy has gone to birthing and promoting stage performances that tell the world about AIDS and HIV -- not just factually and sociopolitically, but in ways aimed at making the story resonate universally as a particularly dramatic example of what it’s like to struggle as an outsider.

As he talks about “AIDS Everlasting” over the phone from his home in Los Feliz, a succession of those complex, origami moments unfold. At one point, Kearns cracks up laughing over one of the strange incongruities of his project: As a curator-arranger who for artistic reasons wants to excerpt, interpret and juxtapose works in unorthodox ways, it’s more convenient for him to deal with dead writers who can’t object than living ones who might want to rein him in.

“I don’t have to worry about them yelling at me,” he said.

A lot of those dead folks were personally dear to him -- among them James Carroll Pickett, the playwright with whom he founded Artists Confronting AIDS, which from 1984 until Pickett’s death from AIDS in 1994 tried to comfort the afflicted, afflict the callous and educate the uninformed by generating AIDS-themed art.

“AIDS Everlasting” begins Wednesday with a special screening of “Nine Lives,” first-time film director Dean Howell’s film adaptation of “complications,” a play about a series of sexual encounters that Kearns patterned after Arthur Schnitzler’s “La Ronde.” The troika of live performance evenings begins Thursday, when dancer-choreographer Peter Carpenter and solo performer Alec Mapa preside over “The Future Generation,” devoted to up-and-coming artists. Friday’s “The Present Generation” collates work from noted living artists, including what Kearns calls a “medley” stringing together sequences from AIDS-themed plays, including Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” and Luis Alfaro’s “Straight as a Line.”

The last night, Saturday, is set aside for remembering the dead: “The Lost Generation,” as Kearns has dubbed it, offers readings from playwrights Pickett and Robert Chesley, author Paul Monette, documentary filmmaker Marlon Riggs and transsexual radio host Connie Norman, among others.

“People still have residual tears, and that’s the night for them to come. It will be the most blatantly emotional,” Kearns said. “I’m designing it so not only will each night have its own buildup, but back-to-back they’ll have a wallop as a trilogy.”

Kearns says some friends have chided him for the seemingly pessimistic spin he’s put on the event by calling it “AIDS Everlasting.”

“I want the heaviness of the title. It’s a tough kind of title, a nudging title, tapping somebody on the shoulder and saying, ‘It’s still here.’ Even if there’s a cure tomorrow, the impact of AIDS will go on for hundreds of years.”

Trolling the universe of AIDS-themed writing and performance for selections worth reviving has given Kearns a chance to consider how artistic approaches have changed with time and what qualities might allow the best stuff to survive into times when the disease is just a bad memory.

“Early on, it didn’t matter what people were doing. Some of it was crap, some brilliant, but it was all valid. There was such an urgent need to communicate and be with people who understand you -- that thing that happens in a church.”

But now he has little patience for AIDS art that is merely polemical. The pieces that still speak to him, he says, capture “the humaneness of it. Not the gayness, not the straightness, not the data, not the politics of it, even -- although all those enter into it. It’s when people connect, and why. It’s that human thing, and that’s going to live forever.”

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‘AIDS Everlasting’

Where: Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica

When: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday (call for schedule)

Ends: Saturday

Price: $15

Contact: (310) 315-1459 or www.highwaysperformance.org