Two playwrights with one purpose

NIKKOLE SALTER understands the compassion fatigue that may have set in around the issue of AIDS and HIV infection. When she told associates a couple of years ago that she was working on a play about a young black Angeleno infected with HIV, she got used to the reaction.

“ ‘We saw “Normal Heart,” we saw “Angels in America,” we saw the movie. Could we puh-leeze move on?’ ” the 26-year-old playwright recalls, with the eye-rolling mockery she has invested in Nia, a hapless teenage misfit who worked at Nordstrom until she took one five-finger discount too many.

Danai Gurira had to contend with a different but equally daunting challenge in creating her drama, which focused on Abigail, a Zimbabwean mother and wife whose upwardly mobile ambitions as a TV newsreader are thrown into a tailspin by a diagnosis of HIV. For Gurira, indifference was compounded by an ignorance with which AIDS in her native country was being discussed.

“It infuriated me how diminutive we were in the minds of the West, that people were talking about AIDS in Africa in a way that was very simplistic and one-dimensional,” says Gurira, 27. “We’re a very diverse and interestingly complex people, but everything is lumped in as though we were one little place. I thought, ‘Can’t we crack open one of those statistics instead of just talking about numbers?’ ”

Knowing that their work, like the people embedded in those statistics, could fall between the cracks, both women continued working on their respective plays as part of the graduate acting program at New York University. Last year a professor suggested that they fuse the two, creating parallel portraits of pregnant women, infected with HIV by their partners, separated by continents but united in their despair.

When “In the Continuum” opened at Primary Stages in October, the New York Times’ Charles Isherwood called it “moving, smart, spirited and powerfully funny” and praised the direction by Robert O’Hara. The acclaim has been sufficient to move the show to a limited commercial run at off-Broadway’s Perry Street Theatre.

Though they share the objective of bringing women front and center in the dramatic literature of AIDS, Salter and Gurira couldn’t be more different. Salter’s savvy bluntness, fermented on the streets of the middle-class L.A. neighborhood of Windsor Hills, contrasts with Gurira’s dignified demeanor, the cosmopolitan result of her life as the daughter of expat academics living in Grinnell, Iowa, who moved back to Harare in 1983 after Zimbabwe gained independence.

Preparing for their performances, in which they play their protagonists as well as several other characters, Gurira practices yoga; Salter does jumping jacks. Yet both possess an intensity that is instrumental in bringing to the public the human face behind the grim statistics.

Since AIDS was first recognized in 1981, more than 25 million people have died of the virus; 40 million are now infected, half of them female. In Zimbabwe, 75% of the new cases are women; in the United States, AIDS is the leading cause of death for African American women ages 25 to 34.

It was that latter statistic that galvanized Salter when she heard about it in an MTV special about the AIDS epidemic. She had also been shaken by a couple of events much earlier. In 1991, her sixth-grade class was shocked by Magic Johnson’s announcement that he had HIV. “It was like our generation’s Kennedy or Martin Luther King’s assassination,” she recalls. The other event was her gay cousin’s death, which the family ascribed to “a parasite from eating crawfish.” She later learned it was the result of AIDS.

Such a sense of taboo regarding open discussion of anything related to morality and personal sexual behavior helped explain why Salter had heard so little about HIV-infected African American women. “As I learned more and more about HIV and the fact that infection had to have taken place for a lot of these women when they were 16, 17 or 18, I began to realize how stupid I had been in some of the choices I had made,” Salter says. “But where were all the stories of these women? How could you make people -- especially teenagers -- more aware they could die from some of those choices?”

In “Continuum,” the men involved in those choices are perpetrators as well as partners, and the audience sees them only through the eyes of their respective victims. In Nia’s case, it is Darnell, a hotshot basketball player on the verge of a lucrative career. In Abigail’s, it is Stanford, an accountant through whom she receives all the respect due “the perfect Shona wife.” In fact, of the 10 or so other characters created by the women -- an L.A. social worker, Nia’s reproving and dispassionate mother, a Zimbabwean nurse, and Abigail’s elitist school chum -- only one is a man: a traditional African healer, or “witch doctor,” to whom the desperate Abigail retreats.

The wages of inequality

THOUGH “In the Continuum” avoids judgment, the women in the play are intimidated into silence because of their unequal relationships with men. “Nia’s mother is ready to get rid of her at 18, but Darnell’s mother still thinks of him as her baby, to be protected at all costs, the golden athlete, the one untouchable in the community,” Salter says. “The different ways they’re raised leads Nia to tap into a kind of personal denial of her own self and needs.”

Given its prevalence there, AIDS is a hard fact of life in Africa. “Everybody knew somebody who had died of AIDS,” Gurira says, recalling a rich, beautiful classmate whose world was upended when first her father, then her mother died from complications of AIDS. “She had been a very good student, but then she started acting crazy, making scary choices.”

What moved the playwright to action was what she saw on her frequent visits home. “The impetus to write this play was definitely rage about how so much masculine behavior goes unchecked by society,” she says. “In Africa, 80% of the married women who have contracted HIV have contracted it from their husbands, and no one talks about that.”

Gurira expresses hope that she and Salter will one day be able to take the play to Harare, perhaps as part of a theater festival this spring. But she’s not sure how it will be received. “I don’t know how men would respond,” she says. “There is such a resistance to speak about gender issues in general. Men feel like they’re being attacked, called out about their masculinity and their privilege and power.”

“In the Continuum” offers little in the way of solutions for its heroines’ predicaments. The most tragic aspect of the play is the women’s overwhelming feelings of isolation and stigma. The safety net is stronger for Nia, for whom there is a host of social programs -- if she seeks them out. “If you have someone delinquent or who tends to run away, like Nia,” Salter says, “then you have someone who can easily fall into a self-destructive cycle and who can do a lot of damage to others before she comes to her senses -- if she ever does.”

Abigail, on the other hand, is just another statistic putting pressure on the strained-to-the-bursting-point resources of Zimbabwe, which is collapsing under the weight of its leader, Robert Mugabe. Sanctions imposed on Mugabe by the West are punishing the people even more. Gurira says that of the international aid given to Africa’s AIDS crisis, Zimbabwe receives $4 per person per year; neighboring Zambia, on the other hand, receives about $100 per patient.

Shaping the discussion

HOWEVER bleak the prognosis for their protagonists -- the lights fade on an ambiguous future for both -- Salter and Gurira express the hope that their characters will become a voice for their respective communities: Nia, the fledgling poet, by rapping about AIDS, and Abigail by being a familiar TV presence who can level with the community -- “I got this from my husband.”

That imagined role for Nia and Abigail is the one place where the characters intersect with the lives of their respective creators. The primary goal of “In the Continuum,” Gurira and Salter say, is to entertain an audience while shaping and continuing an honest discussion of AIDS. “I thought if I could dramatize [issues of HIV infection] in a way that didn’t feel preachy, that was inviting,” Salter says. “Then that could affect the choices people might make regarding sex.”