Life Expectancies: Monologues That Challenge

The average life expectancy is about 75 years. But there's another kind of life expectancy, one that describes how we each feel our life ought to go, ought to be lived. When conflict, obstacles, and tragedies shake our lives, these life expectancies are challenged, stretched to their limits - and sometimes they break. For Michael Kearns this friction between expectation and the unexpected is a wellspring for vivid, authentic drama about everyday and extraordinary people.

In Life Expectancies Kearns grapples with the difficult feelings that result when our expectations don't match our reality, and the resulting monologues challenge the audience and the performer to humanize topics and people who are often willfully ignored. Whether entering the shadow world of the homeless through a street person's thoughts, going far afield to see war's devastation through eyes that have experienced Iraq up close, or clinging to home in order to unknot a father-child relationship, the humor, humanity, and emotional honesty in Kearns' collection of outcasts and misfits prove they are not society's losers, but rather its graceful, artful survivors.

Confront the expectations of yourself, your audience, or a casting director. Read Life Expectancies, perform its gritty, vibrant monologues, and come to understand people whose lives have been changed - for the worse and for the better - by the unexpected.

Michael Kearns has been a fixture in the world of art and politics for more than three decades, combining a mainstream career in film and television with a prolific theatrical resume that includes writing, acting, directing, and producing. His intimate connection to the two plays he chronicles in emotional detail in The Drama of AIDS began in the mid-eighties. Wearing various artistic hats, Michael contributed to the premieres of Robert Chesley’s Jerker and James Carroll Pickett’s Dream Man. And more than twenty years later, he remains closely involved with them. Solo performance has also been a defining feature of his career, and he has been involved with dozens of one-person shows, including many that he wrote and performed such as intimacies, Rock, Attachments, and Make Love Not War. He is also the author of several books with Heinemann, including T-Cells & Sympathy, Acting = Life (both nominated for Lambda Awards), Getting Your Solo Act Together, Life Expectancies, and The Solo Performer’s Journey.