‘AIDS / US / WOMEN’ Packs Emotional Wallop

“AIDS/US/WOMEN” yells fire in a crowded theater. The fire is the plague and the theaters are various ones throughout L.A. from now through mid-June. But make no mistake, this is much more urgent than your average one-act.

“AIDS/US/WOMEN” doesn’t scale the heights of Stanislavskian staging finesse. In fact, it often lurches and stutters. But there aren’t many regular pieces of theater that can leave audiences sobbing, speechless and otherwise thrown for an emotional loop like this work does.

This staged reading is the third in a series of similar outings that began in 1986. The format is simple: Real folks who have or are involved with AIDS tell their stories. But the thing packs a wallop, and not just because of the subject matter.

The performance includes monologues, dialogues and spoken montages compiled and arranged into a text by Lauren Jardine, directed by Steven Kent and produced by Michael Kearns and James Carroll Pickett. It isn’t so much what these women have to say about their varied experiences, although what they’ve gone and are going through should rattle anybody’s cage. What gets you even more are the personalities--and humor--that come through.

The cast includes straight-talking Mary Lucey, an HIV-positive Latina lesbian mother; Helenclare Cox, a white librarian-lookalike grandma whose son died of AIDS and who makes no bones about saying what’s what; Chantal Bullock, a soft-spoken young African-American mother, and her baby, Tranee, both of whom are HIV-positive; Roxy Ventola, an Italian-American woman with AIDS who recently lost her husband and daughter to the disease; Debbie Dachsinger, reading the words of Irene Borger, who directs AIDS Project L.A.’s AIDS/HIV writers’ workshop; Barbara Robinson, a nurse at County-USC AIDS ward; and the singularly dazzling born comedian Connie Norman, an HIV-positive transsexual who’s also a radio talk-show host.

Wallflowers these gals are not. The common denominator in the cast is courage--not just in coping with the virus, but also in coming forth in a forum like this. “I am Woman, Hear Me Roar” indeed. If anyone can still deny that women get AIDS too, it’s through no fault of these artists.

*”AIDS/US/WOMEN,” Barnsdall Park Gallery Theatre, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., Tuesday and June 8, 8 p.m.; Being Alive, 3626 Sunset Blvd., Saturday, 3 p.m.; All Saints AIDS Service Center, 126 W. Del Mar, Pasadena, Sunday, 3 p.m.; McGroarty Arts Center, 7570 McGroarty Terrace, Tujunga, June 12, 8 p.m.; Catch One, 4067 W. Pico Blvd., June 13, 3 p.m.; Unity Fellowship Church, 5149 W. Jefferson Blvd., June 18, 8 p.m. (213) 969-2445. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.