Cinque’s Storytelling

Chris Cinque’s monologue piece “Growing Up Queer in America” opens Saturday at the Ensemble Studio’s Downstage Theatre.

The Minnesota-based actress-writer utilizes Dante’s “Divine Comedy” as a metaphor for her own lesbian journey. “I always felt at a disadvantage because I’m not from one place,” Cinque said. “My father’s from New Jersey, my mother’s a native Floridian. So we always had this North-South thing. And we moved around a lot; I could never fit in. Then being a lesbian--that was like the final straw.

“It’s very difficult,” she added. “The social pressures are just immense. It’s not uncommon to hear women say, ‘I thought I was the only one.’ Being a lesbian is very isolating and very frightening, especially when you’re a 15-year-old girl in the South, being raised a Catholic--and told there’s only one way to be: marry and have children and stay a Catholic. I knew I wasn’t that, but I didn’t know what I was. And everything I’d heard about lesbians was so horrifying. . . .”

In the 80-minute show, Cinque serves as storyteller/narrator (becoming “Santa Claus, a nun, the first woman she falls in love with”)--but not autobiographer. “The model of the journey fits my own life,” she allowed. “That’s why I wanted to take on this big classical drama: To ground my story, and the stories of many other people. So some of it happened to me, some of it didn’t. It’s fiction. As a performer, I have to have some anonymity to do this stuff.”

Emphasis is on the word some.

“When I first did this show (in Minneapolis and Washington) last year, I had an amount of paranoia. I mean, my name and my picture and the word queer were all over town on posters. It’s coming out in a very big way.”

Allyce Beasley trades in the phone-greeting rhymes of “Moonlighting’s” Agnes Dipesto for the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare in the “Romeo and Juliet” that opens Thursday at the Ensemble Studio/L.A., directed by Jeff Miller. Esai Morales and Kim Gillingham play the title roles, with Beasley as Juliet’s nurse--a role traditionally cast, she acknowledges, “as a fat old lady.”

“It’s not a typical production in any sense of the word,” Beasley, 37, continued. “It’s not set in the past, present or future--it sort of takes place in a time frame of its own. But the language and the structure are intact. Whatever the script says has to be there--like a rapier--is there. And there are pieces of old-day costumes too. But we’re also wearing high-tops and Levis. It’s that kind of combination.”

She’s found the marriage of new and old especially rigorous when it comes to the text.

“The language is not archaic--but it’s also not colloquial. The nurse has a speech where she says to Romeo, ‘Stand and rise.’ That was a sexual joke at the time; all she had to do was say that and people would laugh. So we have to keep the language alive for now--without messing with it, but finding and making new references.”

This is the first play the actress has done since achieving her “Moonlighting” celebrity.

“The reason I did this is because of the work,” she said. “I don’t want to be singled out other than as a member of the cast. But I’m real curious to see what happens. I could be judged harsher than everyone else; people have expectations. One of my biggest challenges is making sure there are no traces of Miss Dipesto in the nurse. I’m kind of on a witch hunt about that, getting rid of anything that might in any way be construed as her.”

In Justin Goldberg’s “Testing Negative,” newly opened at the McCadden Place Theatre, AIDS becomes a heterosexual reality.

“It’s the first AIDS play seen from a purely heterosexual point of view,” said the playwright, 22, who also appears in the four-person cast. “The people (in it) are young, unconcerned: They drink, smoke pot, have casual sex--and don’t consider themselves at risk. For them, it’s only a problem for homosexuals. And we live in a society that’s slow to change. We’re saying, ‘This is happening to people we know.’ I hope it shocks people out of their fantasy bubbles.”

Just a few reviews are in for Argentine playwright Eduardo Pavlovsky’s “Pablo,” in its English-language premiere at Stages Trilingual Theatre Center. Hal Bokar (“L”) and Tony Maggio (“V”) are shadowy figures telling tales, posing riddles and ruminating about the never-seen Pablo.

Said Robert Koehler in The Times: “Bokar patrols the entire emotional range like an eagle, but Maggio’s limitations are all too exposed under the glare of such mature, epochal writing. . . . ‘Pablo’ needs a twosome in absolute sync; the drama’s dissonance shouldn’t infect the playing. Yet this is typically precision directing from (translator Paul) Verdier.”

Noted the Herald Examiner’s Richard Stayton: “As in Pinter’s ‘The Dumbwaiter’ and Beckett’s ‘Endgame,’ two men exchange psychological power in a confined space while alluding to an off-stage presence; unlike Pinter and Beckett, Pavlovsky blunts his points with verbal repetition.”

And from Polly Warfield in Drama-Logue: “These are wonderful actors’ faces. Bokar’s is a granite mask etched in pain, Maggio’s a mirror of sensitive reflections. Faces and agile actors’ bodies, sometimes poised in director Verdier’s telling places, sometimes alert in his sharply choreographed movements, are stunningly painted with Kevin Mahan’s dusky, eloquent and masterful lighting.”