Text Box: Actor dies hours after closing of SLC play Mortality tale: One of Eric Tierney's lines was, 'None of us may be around next summer' By Ellen Fagg The Salt Lake Tribune Actor and writer Eric Tierney died early Monday, just eight hours after the final performance of "Love! Valour! Compassion!" a play in which he had a starring role. Tierney, who was 26, died of liver failure associated with hepatitis B. Tierney performed last week in the first four shows of Wasatch Theatre Company's production at Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center before he fell ill and was admitted to the hospital on Thursday. Director Jerry Rapier, who filled in for Tierney as Perry, one of eight gay New Yorkers in the play, joined about three dozen friends and family members who gathered at LDS Hospital on Sunday evening to say goodbye. At the hospital, one line from "Beautiful Dreamer," the song that opens the play's second act, kept running through Rapier's mind: "Gone are the cares of life's busy throng." "In theater, you spend such a concentrated period of time together, you become a family," said Rapier, who had invited Tierney to audition for a role in Terrence McNally's play set in the mid-1990s about the AIDS generation. "To be doing a play about paying attention to your life because you don't know when it will end - well, all of these lines came to mean so much all of a sudden. There's a line that Perry says: 'None of us may be around next summer.' " Tierney, a graduate of West Jordan High School and the University of Utah's Acting Training Program, wrote an events column, "The Gay Agenda," as well as theater reviews and arts stories for Salt Lake Metro, the biweekly gay and lesbian newspaper. He had performed in local shows, notably the Salt Lake Acting Company's 2002 production of "Big Love," but his current role marked a return to the stage after several years away. "It renewed his passion for acting," said his mother, Lee Ann Tierney, of Butte, Mont., who in a phone interview on Monday recalled the witty name of a play her oldest son had written and performed in during junior high: "A Murder with a Twist of Lemon." The oldest of four children, Tierney was the ringleader in the family's parade who enjoyed teasing and prodding his two younger brothers, Chris and Kyler, and sister, Carey. He liked to direct his siblings in acting out a favorite cartoon, "Thundercats," his mother recalled. When his sister interviewed him for a high school paper last year, Tierney said what he wanted to be remembered for was "being good to his family, whom he loved." Throughout the day Monday, friends and family remembered the jokes he told in an Irish brogue, or the deadpan delivery that underscored his wicked sense of humor. In the hospital, when friends repeatedly asked the dying man what they could do for him, Tierney found the joke. "Well," he said. "Are you using your liver?" That wit was on display even in the song he liked to sing in his rich baritone on karaoke outings, "Mack the Knife," written by Kurt Weill for the 1920s-era "Threepenny Opera," the kind of song you might expect to hear from a 66-year-old, not a 26-year-old. "Being 26 years old, he had so much energy and enthusiasm," said Michael Aaron, Tierney's editor at SLMetro. "He was constantly bombarding himself with so many things. He wanted to be in so many different productions, wanted to volunteer, wanted to help all of his friends be bigger and better stars. He was constantly filling his plate up with more and more things to do, then trying to figure out how to get things done." He was motivated by Utah voters' passing of Measure 3, the constitutional amendment banning gay marriages, to become more vocal about politics, and was working with two friends on a documentary, "I Can't Believe It's Not Marriage." For a time, he even considered attending law school, but his role in "Love! Valour! Compassion!" rekindled his desire to act. "The dude had an unnatural disposition to be natural," said Lane Richins, a longtime friend who attended acting classes with Tierney at the U. "The guy could take a role, and no matter what it was, he could make it seem like a regular person. He would just tear into any role he had, like a wolf on meat." He was kind, too, Richins said, recounting one night back in their freshman year, when Tierney had driven all the way from home in West Jordan to a party. Once he arrived, about 2 a.m., he found Richins was drunk, and so he tucked his friend into bed, told him a bedtime yarn, and then drove across the valley to go home. Tierney and another friend, Pearce Danner, used to joke about how they planned to grow old together, a pair of crotchety old men bothering the nurses in the retirement home. "He was proficient in things from politics to wine to books to musicals, just everything," Danner said. "He and I could have an argument about something I thought I was well-versed in, and he put me to shame." And so early Monday morning, as Tierney's brain was swelling as a result of liver failure, Danner took his turn in the hospital room to sing his farewell, cheesy songs the pair had sung with their friends so many times, songs such as "America," the old Simon and Garfunkel song, and "Thank You for Being a Friend." Just another friend, dying too young. Gone are the cares of life's busy throng. "For those of us involved in the play," director Rapier said, "we found some comfort there, that he had found himself again." --- Contact Ellen Fagg at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib .com.