"It's a holiday show!" says Karla Boos. "With live music!"

The implication is that it's unlike the usual Quantum Theatre play, whatever that might be. But as usual, Quantum is introducing Pittsburgh to a playwright it doesn't know. Octavio Solis' "El Paso Blue" is described as "a dark, rapturous look at the immigrant experience ... part country & western grand opera, part Oedipal tragedy and part buddies-on-the-road saga, with a dirty-mouthed goddess along for the ride."

		'El Paso Blue' Where: Quantum Theatre at 55th Street Warehouse, Lawrenceville. When: Through Dec. 17; Wed.-Fri. 8 p.m. Sat. 5:30 and 9 p.m.; Sun. 7 p.m. Tickets: $15-$27; 412-394-3353.

With "El Paso Blue," Boos is in her producer mode, neither directing nor acting, so her enthusiasm seems purer than usual. She's also high on the "lonely warehouse" on 55th Street where Quantum will perform --"cleaner, warmer, and more contemporary" than many of the company's spaces.

Directing is Sheila McKenna, who showed some familiarity with Hispanic language and culture acting in last year's "Dogface," which Quantum took to a theater festival in Spain. McKenna says she and Boos agreed that "El Paso Blue" fit her taste for "music, dark comedy, intricate plot, family dynamics and cultural conflict. It's a beautiful, poetic play full of rich slang."

It includes passages in Spanish, but when one character speaks Spanish, another answers in English, so the English-speaking audience is never left behind.

The 55th Street Warehouse is in Lawrenceville by the Allegheny River (there is plenty of parking). You enter through a huge hall of platforms on stilts, to discover a heated area with 139 seats gathered around a small, colorful set by the inventive Tony Ferrieri with eight or more acting areas.

The dirty-mouthed goddess was otherwise engaged, so I asked to talk to the two Spanish-speaking actors who have been brought in to fill that gap in Pittsburgh's professional acting pool. Boos and Mc- Kenna had agreed from the start it was important not to cast an Anglo actor in a Latino role.

Tim Andres Pabon, from Washington, D.C., plays the protagonist, Alejandro, a young, one-time dope dealer. Fermin Suarez, from New York City, plays Jefe, his father. They represent the older immigrant and his acclimatized son, which begins to describe the actors, as well.

Suarez was born in the Dominican Republic to a family in show business. He got involved in theater and TV as a teenager, and, in 1989, he moved to New York ("I thought I'd already done what I could" at home). He has since worked for all the New York Hispanic theater companies, performing in Spanish, speaking English only when the company performs bi-lingually. He also does a lot of dubbing into Spanish for the Latin American market.

"This is my first American play," he says. He used to fear performing in English, because of his strong accent. "I came here when I was 25 and learned English by myself. I'm very attached to my culture." But he notices that more and more actors now have accents as the profession gets more multi-ethnic.

Pabon is from Washington, D.C. His English is as accent-free as most Americans', but his first language was Spanish, which he speaks like a Spaniard, thanks to his language-teaching parents -- an Anglo mother and a father half Puerto Rican and half Dominican -- with whom he spent much of his youth in Madrid.

His education was at Lawrenceville Academy, at Middlebury College, where he caught the acting bug ("just telling stories with my friends") and at Washington's Catholic University, where he earned an MFA.

His Web site (www.timpabon.com) advertises voiceovers in both English and Spanish. In New York, with its large Hispanic acting pool, he says he gets called only for Castillian Spanish, but in D.C., he does a broader range. Suarez says his Spanish accent in performance is "very neutral," but recently, theaters and TV have been requesting more specific accents. In conversation, his natural Dominican accent dominates.

Talking with the two is a criss-cross of cultural references, a reminder of the multiversity of America, where language, dialect and race are a rich arena for both conflict and variety.

But Pittsburgh? The Hispanic population here is up to six percent, McKenna says. As to "El Paso Blue," she notes that although Pittsburgh isn't a border town, immigration has brought the border everywhere. And Pittsburgh certainly has familiarity with the immigrant experience and its issues of cultural loyalty and assimilation.

Suarez says he loves adventures. Once he drove from New York to Alaska, and he survived a several-month stay in Arkansas (even though that accent defeated him). So a sojourn in Pittsburgh doesn't seem far-fetched.