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Story about AIDS delivers powerful punch at CPT
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Reviewed by: FRAN HELLER Contributing Writer
Two women. Two stools. One powerful story.
That’s all it takes to keep audiences riveted to “In the Continuum,” a play about HIV/AIDS and its continuing devastating impact on black women, written by Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter. It’s at Cleveland Public Theatre through May 3.
The drama parallels the lives of two women: a Zimbabwean and an urban black teen living in the ghetto of South Central Los Angeles. In the course of a single day, both women will discover they are pregnant and HIV-positive. Though they are continents apart, their stories are similar in terms of the fears, prejudices, and social and cultural taboos surrounding their illness.
Tony Sias’s precise direction weaves the two different worlds into a moving whole.
An off-Broadway hit in 2005, the Cleveland production stars Kimberly Brown as Nia, a promising but troubled American teen, and Bianca Sams as Abigail, a successful newscaster and married woman in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. In addition to these roles, the two protagonists impersonate a medley of other characters in the course of the play.
In Africa, as well as in America, the issue of HIV/AIDS for black women cannot be separated from issues of race and gender, which the production makes perfectly clear. As a middle-class professional, Abigail stands to lose everything, including her career, her husband (who gave her the disease), and her child once it gets out she is HIV positive.
Nia, a victim of poverty, lives in a fantasy world about marrying the rising basketball star who impregnated her and achieving the American Dream. That world comes crashing down when she learns she has HIV.
For 85 uninterrupted minutes, Brown and Sams hold viewers captive as they shift multiple roles with extraordinary finesse and ease. The play consists of a series of interlacing monologues that could easily become static in lesser hands.
When HIV/AIDS first cast its shadow on the American landscape in the 1980s, it was considered a disease that mostly afflicted gay men. Today, black women have the highest rate of new infections, both in the U.S. and in Africa.
Ample doses of pungent humor prevent the overtly political and academic tone from sounding too preachy. Sams’s African dialect is flawlessly executed, a tribute to dialect coach Nancy Miti Moyo, a native of Zimbabwe.
In a series of 15 short scenes, the twin experiences of these two women take shape, from diagnosis and shock, to anger, denial and quiet desperation.
Besides Abigail, the other characters Sams portrays include an indifferent and callous nurse who informs Abigail there are no drugs for treatment; an overbearing friend who has become the poster girl for AIDS in Africa; a “witch doctor” whom Abigail turns to for “a cure”; a sex worker; and Abigail’s maid. Each of these characters is sharply drawn by Sams.
The other characters in Nia’s life, all extremely well-portrayed by Brown, include a reproachful social worker who has tried without success to help the self-destructive girl; her disapproving mother; a street-smart cousin; and the tough-minded, protective mother of her boyfriend.
The realistic, unsentimental ending packs a wallop.
Trad A Burns’s nondescript set (a bench, two rows of freestanding panels and a pale blue backdrop) and James Kosmatka’s sporadic sound effects do little in the way of dramatizing the two worlds these women inhabit. Only Harold Crawford’s costumes, from Abigail’s native dress to Nia’s Western dress, embellish character and environment.
“In the Continuum” brings to light many of the problems that face individuals with HIV/AIDS. Wisely, it refrains from giving answers, leaving audience members to find their own.
Two women. Two stools. One powerful story.
That’s all it takes to keep audiences riveted to “In the Continuum,” a play about HIV/AIDS and its continuing devastating impact on black women, written by Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter. It’s at Cleveland Public Theatre through May 3.
The drama parallels the lives of two women: a Zimbabwean and an urban black teen living in the ghetto of South Central Los Angeles. In the course of a single day, both women will discover they are pregnant and HIV-positive. Though they are continents apart, their stories are similar in terms of the fears, prejudices, and social and cultural taboos surrounding their illness.
Tony Sias’s precise direction weaves the two different worlds into a moving whole.
An off-Broadway hit in 2005, the Cleveland production stars Kimberly Brown as Nia, a promising but troubled American teen, and Bianca Sams as Abigail, a successful newscaster and married woman in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. In addition to these roles, the two protagonists impersonate a medley of other characters in the course of the play.
In Africa, as well as in America, the issue of HIV/AIDS for black women cannot be separated from issues of race and gender, which the production makes perfectly clear. As a middle-class professional, Abigail stands to lose everything, including her career, her husband (who gave her the disease), and her child once it gets out she is HIV positive.
Nia, a victim of poverty, lives in a fantasy world about marrying the rising basketball star who impregnated her and achieving the American Dream. That world comes crashing down when she learns she has HIV.
For 85 uninterrupted minutes, Brown and Sams hold viewers captive as they shift multiple roles with extraordinary finesse and ease. The play consists of a series of interlacing monologues that could easily become static in lesser hands.
When HIV/AIDS first cast its shadow on the American landscape in the 1980s, it was considered a disease that mostly afflicted gay men. Today, black women have the highest rate of new infections, both in the U.S. and in Africa.
Ample doses of pungent humor prevent the overtly political and academic tone from sounding too preachy. Sams’s African dialect is flawlessly executed, a tribute to dialect coach Nancy Miti Moyo, a native of Zimbabwe.
In a series of 15 short scenes, the twin experiences of these two women take shape, from diagnosis and shock, to anger, denial and quiet desperation.
Besides Abigail, the other characters Sams portrays include an indifferent and callous nurse who informs Abigail there are no drugs for treatment; an overbearing friend who has become the poster girl for AIDS in Africa; a “witch doctor” whom Abigail turns to for “a cure”; a sex worker; and Abigail’s maid. Each of these characters is sharply drawn by Sams.
The other characters in Nia’s life, all extremely well-portrayed by Brown, include a reproachful social worker who has tried without success to help the self-destructive girl; her disapproving mother; a street-smart cousin; and the tough-minded, protective mother of her boyfriend.
The realistic, unsentimental ending packs a wallop.
Trad A Burns’s nondescript set (a bench, two rows of freestanding panels and a pale blue backdrop) and James Kosmatka’s sporadic sound effects do little in the way of dramatizing the two worlds these women inhabit. Only Harold Crawford’s costumes, from Abigail’s native dress to Nia’s Western dress, embellish character and environment.
“In the Continuum” brings to light many of the problems that face individuals with HIV/AIDS. Wisely, it refrains from giving answers, leaving audience members to find their own.
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