Washington Blade - September 8, 2006
Patrick Folliard

In the '90s, similarly-themed efforts penned by gay playwrights continued to command attention, including Tony Kushner's epic masterpiece "Angels In America, Parts One and Two," Paul Rudnick's popular hit comedy "Jeffrey," and Terrence McNally's "Love! Valor! Compassion!"

Over the years, playwrights and audiences have attempted to make sense of HIV/AIDS, to react to its horror, place it in a political context, and to look for hope and meaning beyond its devastation. But as new medicines appeared on the scene, tempering the immediate threat of the disease - at least for Manhattan's middle-class, white gay population who mostly inhabit these scripts - plays about AIDS sort of disappeared.

Today, black women represent the highest rates of new HIV infections in both the United States and Africa. "In the Continuum," a powerful 90-minute tragicomedy written and performed by Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter and currently playing at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, addresses that statistic by giving a voice to black women with AIDS and keeping the AIDS play current.

IN A SERIES OF seamlessly interwoven, fascinating vignettes, Gurira and Salter portray the parallel lives of two young women, Abigail and Nia, who both learn in the course of a day that they are pregnant and have contracted HIV from the men they love. Though these intelligent, endearing characters live in vastly different worlds on separate continents (one in America, one in Africa) many of their fears and feelings overlap.

With the unexpected diagnosis, the women's worlds are upturned, and both seek to find support in a shaky personal network of friends and relations including a witch doctor, stereotypical social worker, snotty high school acquaintance, opportunistic cousin, unsympathetic mother and more (all played with revelatory insight by Gurira and Salter).

An educated, middle-class Zimbabwean woman, Abigail is a bright glimmer in a discouraging gray sea of poverty and disillusionment. For her, a visit to the clinic changes everything. If revealed, her newly-discovered HIV status could cause her to lose her job, husband and son. It's a very real possibility that she will be sent back to her rural village to beg in the dusty streets.

At 19, Nia is estranged from her family, lives in a homeless shelter for young women, and was recently fired from a minimum wage job at Nordstrom's for stealing. Despite the tired scenario, Nia loves life. She's a promising poet who likes to party. Her boyfriend Darnell is a high school basketball star with a more-than-sunny future.

Unlike Abigail, for Nia, a positive test result comes with medical care and medication, but as an unemployed teenage mother-to-be with HIV, she is staring down a hard road of relative poverty and possibly ostracism from her peers.

DIRECTOR ROBERT O'HARA gracefully brings the characters' two worlds together. His beautifully understated staging carries each character's inner turmoil to the forefront.

Like Nia, Salter is from Los Angeles and Gurira was born and grew up in Zimbabwe. The pair met at New York University's graduate acting program, where they began their collaboration in response to the number of black women with HIV/AIDS.

As "In the Continuum" plays out its run in Washington and moves forward on its national tour, hopefully the population portrayed onstage will be present in the audience able to share in the experience, like with productions of AIDS plays before it.

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