AIDS: Telling the Unheard Stories

When asked where the idea for "In the Continuum" came from, co-author Nikkole Salter recalls a moment four years ago, when, as a 24-year-old grad student in New York University's theater program, she was working out while watching an MTV special on television. The host was talking about AIDS, and what he had to say stopped her in her tracks.

"He said that AIDS was the leading cause of death in African American women between the ages of 24 and 35," she says by e-mail during a recent week of performances at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. "AIDS. Not homicide. Not diabetes. AIDS. And it just hit me in my gut," she says. "I was 24 at the time. Who were these women? Where were the plays keeping the issue at the forefront?"

Danai Gurira, a classmate of Salter's and a native of Zimbabwe, was asking the same questions. By the time she was 19 and left for college in the United States, about a quarter of Zimbabwe's population had HIV, and more than half of those were women. In Zimbabwe, she knew, their plight was being met with silence.

"When someone dies," Gurira says, "no one wants to and no one will even mention what the cause of death was, as if there is shame associated with it. The problem is still quite gendered. When I asked a few men what they felt was causing the perpetuation of this epidemic, they were quite quick to put the blame solely and squarely on the shoulders of women."

In the United States, plays dealing with AIDS are practically a subgenre of American theater -- Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" and Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart" are only a few of the best known. But although these plays typically focus on the ravages of the disease in the gay community, women have been only a small part of the story.

So Gurira and Salter joined forces to remedy the situation. In their final year of school, they began constructing monologues dealing with women and AIDS. A professor suggested that they collaborate onstage. "In the Continuum" came out of that partnership, and, as Salter puts it, "we've been working together ever since." The 90-minute play opened in New York in October, with Salter and Gurira performing all the roles. Since its opening in the Bronx, the play has had runs in Harare, Zimbabwe; Cape Town, South Africa; and Edinburgh. Now it comes to Washington in a limited run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre.

"Putting two black women from two different parts of the world on the stage at the same time and hearing their subjective experiences is, I guess, unusual and different," Gurira says. "Hopefully this is the beginning of it ceasing to be unusual."

At first, the two principal characters, Abigail (played by Gurira) and Nia (Salter), appear to have little in common. Abigail is an educated Zimbabwean mother who reads daily news bulletins on the state-owned news station. Nia is a 19-year-old poet from crime-ridden South Central Los Angeles. Both are pregnant, however, and both have received the devastating news that they've tested positive for HIV. Though the two women never meet each other, the world suddenly seems a lot smaller, and scarier.

"The lack of resources is the first scare," Gurira says. "In [Zimbabwe], with over 1,000 percent inflation, she is not going to be offered free drugs and free resources. . . . And if she is married, there are several issues that women face when they test first, including punishment from her husband and family."

Then, Salter says, among single African American mothers, the disease can be particularly scary. "It's already difficult being a single parent," Salter says, "but to have to cope with the full-time job of monitoring your health . . . it must be exhausting."

Neither writer considers this simply a message play. In Zimbabwe, staged skits have been used to educate communities about AIDS. But Gurira notes that for the most part, the dramas are "usually very clinical -- quite basic, trying to get the information out." "In the Continuum," she says, is more concerned with living, breathing human beings who respond to their situations with fear, humor and denial. When the production came to Zimbabwe, people lined up around the block to see it.

"It was more than I asked for, really," Gurira says. "I hadn't performed at home since I was in high school. It was also special to have young, Zimbabwean girls approach me and tell me how inspired they were to go out and create by the play."

In the United States, Salter and Gurira face a different audience, one still oblivious to the scale of the AIDS crisis. As Gurira puts it, the play was written for them, too.

"I created it especially for the Westerner who does not feel that they have anything to do with this problem and that they don't have anything in common with a young woman from Zimbabwe. . . . And I hoped that by connecting a white, middle-class man to an Abigail or a Nia for a short while might expand his own humanity."

"Some people feel safe when they say that the problem belongs to someone else," Salter adds, "but AIDS touches everybody. The health of each individual on the planet either directly or indirectly affects everyone. It affects our potential as a human race."

In the Continuum Woolly Mammoth Theatre 202-393-3939 Through Sept. 24