The Bluebarn Theater is in their 36th Season, with a theme of Purpose, and The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me is the fourth show in the five-show series. Having premiered on March 27, this one-person show follows original author David Drake on his journey as a queer person during the AIDS crisis, and how this sparked his path to activism.
As a one-person show, actor Christian Negron expressed his excitement for the audience to be in the room. Besides just getting a little lonely on stage sometimes, Negron said “this play is our loved ones, and our chosen community is something queer people say is really important. Audiences engaging in that and building that community through this show will be sometime really special.”
This project has already connected community members in a quite tangible way. Jim Benson was an original pioneer in the creation of the NAMES Project and subsequently the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Benson was born and raised in Grand Island; when he left Nebraska, he said part of AIDS quilt was “hanging in the lobby” of his new workplace. That’s why bringing a piece of the quilt to display at the Bluebarn during the run of The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me was so important to him. “You see that Ed Elliott is up there or Cal Anderson and you see that people cared about this person, and their humanity was actually something you could make tangible,” Benson explained. He heard that the show was being produced and knew this was the right time to return himself to Nebraska along with the quilt piece.
Director Susan Clement originally directed this show at the Bluebarn in 1993. The production rights were easy to obtain back then; Clement and the team called David Drake and asked for permission. “What’s happening in the world today is a good meter of how we choose our shows. The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me just kept coming back to me. Everything happening in the United States is reverberating a lot of truths and bringing back old mentalities, so it could not be a more perfect time to do this piece again,” Clement said of bringing back the production after 32 years. She also expressed her wish for audience members to have a truly authentic interaction with the production, and hopes that anyone who sees it is inspired to make a positive impact on the community around them.
