Before and after a recent performance of In the Continuum – continuing through December 10 at Los Angeles’ Kirk Douglas Theatre – TV news programs carried stories that sounded as if they had been lifted from the play.
Preceding the performance, CBS covered Bill Clinton’s trip to India to announce grants to lower the cost of AIDS medicine. In the play, a nurse in Zimbabwe scoffs when a newly infected expectant woman asks about the availability of HIV drugs. On December 1, the evening after our performance, BBC carried a World AIDS Day story in which an African doctor reported that her countrymen continue to abstain from condom use but not from extramarital sex, routinely infecting wives and future babies as a result. In the play, a woman in Africa and one in the American inner city struggle to make choices in a male society further complicated by denial over AIDS.
The fact that these news stories parallel the stories within the play charges the stage with rare political immediacy. But the triumph of Continuum is that this achievement is a by-product of the play's dramatic intimacy. Danai Gurira and Nikkkole Salter, who wrote the script, have been its only interpreters since its premiere at New York’s Primary Stages in 2005 and subsequent mounting in Harare earlier this year. After Los Angeles they will move it to three more U.S. cities. (See schedule at end of review.)
It is beautifully written, with plot points and exposition allowed to occasionally fall from the dialogue like items bouncing from an open purse. The acting is brutally honest and emotionally raw, yet never overplayed.
Each actor portrays a central, point-of-view character – Gurira’s Abigail is in Zimbabwe; Salter’s Nia is in L.A. – and the half-dozen characters they meet over the course of their mirror-image day. Despite the availability of a second actor, there is no dialogue and the two strictly maintain their U.S.-Africa division. Like girls on a teeter totter, they balance each other by keeping their distance. The play resembles a pair of one-woman shows, coiling around one another like a double-helix, sometimes crossing over on an intersecting word or phrase. This 'two solos' architecture means that all the characters Abigail and Nia meet will be alone onstage. When those characters address the protagonists, they do it by speaking out towards the audience. As a result, we temporarily are Nia or Abigail, and for that moment are harboring their secrets with them. We know the temptation to leave the speakers in their innocence, and feel Nia and Abigail wrestle with when – if ever – to disclose "our" predicament.
One "continuum" is this need to internalize and deny painful reality for the sake of the family's cohesion or one's personal safety. The more positive reference is the unseen bond, like the submerged current of a river, that links "sisters" half a world apart. The battle to break out of one and embrace the better shifts back and forth throughout the play. Which will prevail, and whether the men in these stories will appear to redeem themselves, are questions expertly suspended until the final blackout.
Article comments