The New York Times - October 1, 2005
Felicia R. Lee

Their teacher suggested they join forces. The results are "In the Continuum," which they wrote together and performed as their final semester project. The play is now having a commercial run: it is opening tomorrow night at Primary Stages' 59E59 Theaters.

"It deals with these issues in a completely unique way," Andrew Leynse, the artistic director of Primary Stages, said of the play's 90-minute mix of pathos, humor and sharply etched characters. While AIDS worked its way into the national consciousness long ago and has found artful expression in plays like "Angels in America," Mr. Leynse said he was unaware of a story about AIDS from the perspectives of both an African-American woman and an African woman.

"In the Continuum" is about Abigail, a middle-class, married mother in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Nia, a teenager in the Los Angeles ghetto. They are very different but have a dark connection: both are pregnant and H.I.V. positive, having contracted the virus from their men.

The authors were inspired to write about AIDS by the frightening increase in H.I.V. infection among black women in the United States and Africa. Ms. Gurira, who is 27 and has a degree in psychology, was all too familiar with the disease because one of every four adults in Zimbabwe is estimated to have the virus. Ms. Salter, 26, learned that AIDS was now the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 25 to 34 by watching a news program.

"Who were these women?" Ms. Salter recalled asking herself. "Where were these stories?"

They wanted to humanize these statistics without being didactic. So the show opens with a scene of the actresses as children, chanting:

Cousin's on the corner in the welfare line

Brother's in the slammer, he committed a crime

Preacher's in the club on the down low creep

And yo mama's in the gutter screamin' H.I.V.

Ms. Gurira and Ms. Salter began developing their characters individually, coming together to criticize each other's work and find ways to use dialogue and accents to create two worlds.

"I'd just get up and improvise the words," Ms. Gurira recalled. "Nikkole would say, 'This works,' or 'This doesn't.' I would say, "You're trying to say this,' or 'This sounds contrived.' We were very blunt."

Each portrays several different characters. Ms. Salter, for example, plays Nia's constantly chiding, bourgeois social worker (Nia is a foster child); Nia's embittered mother, who ridicules all her daughter's choices; and the cynical mother of Nia's basketball-playing boyfriend. This woman tries to buy Nia's silence with a $5,000 check, explaining that her son cannot disclose his H.I.V. status without jeopardizing his chance to be a professional athlete. When Nia tells her that she's pregnant, she slyly informs Nia that the family has already dealt with two paternity suits.

As for Abigail, she learns her H.I.V. status from a nasty, overworked nurse in a clinic who barks her order for lunch while offering to show Abigail how to use a condom. The tiny Ms. Gurira dons a fuzzy wig to play Abigail's world-weary high school friend turned prostitute, who advises Abigail to find a sugar daddy and to forget her philandering husband, an accountant. At another point, Ms. Gurira morphs into an impatient witch doctor who tells the now desperate Abigail that he cannot cure AIDS.

Ms. Gurira and Ms. Salter fine-tuned the play by working with the playwright Charlayne Woodard last August at the Ojai Playwrights Conference in California. They later took it to the Mud/Bone Collective, a small theater in the South Bronx where Mr. Leynse saw it in September 2004.

The play's title works on several levels, the women said. It suggests connections between generations and cultures, as well as continued cycles of both despair and endurance among blacks. It also means that the playwrights are trying to bring the stories of women into the continuum of stories about AIDS.

Next for Ms. Salter is a small role as a resident of a Chicago housing project in a film called "All Fall Down," scheduled for release next year. Ms. Gurira is researching a documentary on Zimbabwe bride prices. Both hope to write and create their own projects.

"You have to go through this human journey for the sake of someone else," Ms. Gurira said of the demands of live performance. "I love the possibilities. "
051001
NYT051001