ACTING NATURALLY –
May 5, 2023 –
BLADE: How does your sexuality impact your work?
SALINAS: I’m open to whatever the role. Being gay has made me observant and given me the experience to connect with feelings and emotion. That helps to construct characters in a sensitive and different way. I’ve played straight characters without issue. I made a very convincing Romeo in Chicago [his home base for eight years prior to D.C.].
Growing up in Mexico City, I started acting classes at age six and did my first play when I was ten. I always was true to myself and very comfortable. I came out to my mother when I had my first boyfriend at seventeen. She cried, blamed herself, and promised to continue to love and support me, and she has. Definitely the best-case scenario.
BLADE: You also write. You wrote a play titled “LOVEknots.”
SALINAS: Yes, it’s about love and relationships (trans, straight, gay, platonic, familial), and features four actors playing seven roles each in 17 short vignettes. It was onstage for more than three years in Mexico City. I really want to bring it to Washington.
BLADE: Anything else you’d like to do here?
SALINAS: I’m going to do my play “La Pájara de San Juan,” a Trump-era drama about two sisters, one documented, one not, at the Mexican Cultural Institute in September in Spanish with English subtitles. It premiered at the International Latino Theater Festival 2022 in Chicago.
