‘Attachments’ Adopts Self-Centered Tone

In “Attachments,” a monologue by an HIV-positive gay man about his struggle to adopt a baby girl, actor-monologuist Michael Kearns asks us to love and support him without question. From the first synthesized strains of the lullaby that opens the show, “Attachments” calls upon a seemingly unselfish emotion--the love of a baby--and uses it as a shield to duck some rather thorny questions.

This is a naked, if carefully worded, cry of pain, the autobiographical story of a sensitive man from a severely dysfunctional family who goes through the agony of losing a lover and several friends to AIDS, and then confronts an overwhelming urge to father--and to mother--a child. Kearns’ one-man show is at Highways in Santa Monica.

As a single gay man, Kearns is a foster parent to several children, including an African American baby named Mia, whom he desperately wants to adopt. He gets approved for an adoption, but the agency reneges when it finds out he is HIV-positive. In one of his most aggrieved and self-obsessed moments, he demands: “You approved me. Have you forgotten what’s good about me now that you know I’m HIV-positive?”

He believes the agency is trying to shame him and he insists he will not be shamed: “I deserve to be a parent as much as anyone else in the world.” One has to wonder, as the adoption agency surely must have, about his concern for the future of the baby.

While Kearns amply demonstrates his intense desire to be a parent, he skates over the possibility that he could leave behind a young, orphaned child, as if that didn’t need to be even considered. “My father was not a parent for five minutes,” he argues. “Why is the length of my life an issue?” he asks with a psychic stamp of the foot.

By never acknowledging that as a single parent his HIV status is a valid consideration, Kearns leaves a giant hole in the bottom of his monologue.

He has his lighter moments. Fed up with white people asking him if the African American baby he carries around is his, he answers, “No, I just grabbed her out of a car in the parking lot.”

Other parts of his story are chillingly told--the depressed father, the alcoholic and wholly inappropriate mother, the now-familiar litany of how a grown man deals with death all around him. But Kearns does not always seem confident with the riskier confessional stuff of the monologue. A very funky riff about the younger Michael imagining sex with his father comes off as weird--the actor seems to indicate this is a perfectly normal stage of development and yet at the same time appears to feel fairly uncomfortable about sharing it.

Director Bruce Blair’s by-the-numbers direction has not relaxed or freed the actor. Kearns’ physical presence--neat, with a thick mustache and woefully serious demeanor, checked occasionally by a vocally forced high spirit--does not beguile us into the interior of this painful story.

Kearns relates a news item from a zoo in Germany. Some orphaned penguin eggs were taken to the stork cage, where two male storks hatched them and raised the penguins as their own. The story, a great metaphor for adoptive gay parenting, does not address the more difficult aspects of Kearns’ situation. All of which makes “Attachments” an hour of self-examination with an emphasis on the self.

* “Attachments,” Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, Wednesday-Saturday, 8:30 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Ends Sunday. $12. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour.