Two playwrights walk out onto the sparsely set stage wearing black tank tops and black slacks, the audience left wondering what to expect. Is this the beginning? Are they still setting up? But when the lights flick on, Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter—the playwrights and only actors of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s In the Continuum—start dancing and chanting a children’s song with almost tribal repercussions, immediately grabbing the audience’s attention.
From there on, the two schoolyard playmates split into their leading roles. The Audience is introduced to Abigail (Gurira), a high-strung news anchor in Harare, Zimbabwe, as she prepares to read the news. Nia (Salter) is a self-involved party-hopping teenager from south-central Los Angeles with many relationship problems. The two protagonists never meet, much less leave their own countries, but they often inhabit the same stage, talking over one another, interrupting the other and sharing stage effects; a gunshot in Nia’s world becomes a power outage in Abigail’s.
Most of the play’s dialogue, including those introducing both characters, use the audience as the second, silent interlocutor. Nia converses with a friend looking out into the audience. Abigail talks with an equally absent co-worker. One side of the conversation gives us enough information to follow the plot while forcing a few inferences required to enjoy all the humor that Gurira and Salter intend.
Both the writing and the actors’ charisma develop the characters quickly and tenderly with both individuality and wild humor. Within the first half hour, each learns that she is not only pregnant but also HIV positive. The stark stage set prevents the audience from directly seeing the worlds which force Abigail and Nia to find new strength and independence. Instead, we see these worlds only through the eyes of the two characters on stage—a startlingly effective method.
In a harrowing scene from the Harare half, Abigail tries to hail a taxi from the clinic where she has just been informed of her condition. Street kids swarm her, asking for money (Gurira’s body language perfectly portrays the absent children). As she shoos them off with a sharp, “Where are your parents?” her eyes and face express a world orphaned by AIDS better than any set design or extras could.
Robert O’Hara’s stage direction is sparse, using only two stools and a few loose props, such as purses, a clipboard and cell phones. The costumes are equally simple. Neither actor changes out of her black tank top and slacks. They merely highlight these clothes with brightly colored handkerchiefs shifted from waist to head and around the torso.
The entire production rests on the shoulders of the two leads. Luckily, each shows comic and dramatic range, timing and wit. Their two personalities, and the personalities of the heroines they inhabit, give the evening enough energy to carry an emotional and very humanizing journey through the ordeals of African and African-American women diagnosed with HIV. Though the plot unwinds towards a somewhat unfocused conclusion, you’ll leave the theater reveling in the writing while still considering the themes.
