‘Continuum’ makes the numbers talk

For 17-year-old Justin Sosa, a student at Central High School in Los Angeles, the subject of the play “In the Continuum” does not represent new turf.

The women who wrote and perform the play -- Zimbabwe-born Danai Gurira and Los Angeles native Nikkole Salter -- say they were inspired by the AIDS pandemic among African and African American women. The characters -- both HIV positive -- show that the problem crosses cultures and continents.

“What boggled me about the issue was that AIDS is the leading cause of death among African American women ages 25 to 34,” says Salter. “Not sickle cell or heart disease or homicide. This is a huge demographic, and yet we don’t hear about it.”

But Sosa, who was among a group of high school students attending a preview performance last week at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, had indeed heard similar statistics.

“Being a minority myself, I get a lot of people telling me that I am at higher risk,” he said.

But, Sosa added, the drama shed some emotional light that went far beyond the facts. “To see this, the way the characters put themselves into it, the audience feels like it is real,” he said.

Students said “In the Continuum” hit home in a way that no statistics could.

“It was not PC, as plays normally are -- they weren’t really censoring themselves on the language they used and the movements they used,” Sosa said. “It wasn’t just a script being read.”

In a post-performance discussion, students from four schools -- San Antonio High in Huntington Park and Central, both continuation schools, Palmdale’s Highland High and Hamilton High in Los Angeles -- at first skirted the AIDS issue in favor of quizzing the two performers about their creative process. Mostly, they wanted to know whether the stories were autobiographical: No, Salter assured them. “It’s just a story, it’s completely fiction.”

But the students soon warmed to the challenge.

Like Sosa, 17-year-old J.D. Fairman of Hamilton High said it meant more to hear about the facts of AIDS through the intimate stories of the fictional characters onstage.

Fairman said he has read several plays about AIDS, including Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” that explore its devastation mostly from the perspective of white homosexual men. He believes this is the voice that has so far dominated American theater’s conversation about the disease.

“It was a different point of view,” Fairman said. “And most stories about Africa are like the nightly news in the sense that you feel that you are watching it from the outside. We don’t get an inside view of Africa.”

Added Fairman, “I think a lot of people don’t realize that it’s not just gays who are getting AIDS; it’s everywhere. It’s women and minorities.”

Salter and Gurira were working on separate plays about AIDS among black women as graduate students at New York University when a professor suggested they fuse their stories into one.

The play, developed in part at the Ojai Playwrights Conference, opened at New York’s Primary Stages in 2005, then moved to off-Broadway’s Perry Street Theatre and has since been on tour.

Without revealing plot specifics, it is safe to say that some students were disappointed that characters onstage did not always make heroic choices. But, said Hamilton High student Laura Donney, 17, “that was good -- it was not what a Hollywood happy ending would be.”

The creative forces behind the play -- Gurira, Salter and director Robert O’Hara -- believe the key to the show’s impact is that it is a character drama, not an educational tool. Still, they can’t help but be aware of its significance in that regard.

“It means something to me because I am gay and an African American; it deals with things that resonate with me,” says O’Hara. “You usually see AIDS stories about gay white men. It’s much more than a play to me.”

Still, in separate conversations, Salter and Gurira both said they knew they couldn’t just be actors when it came to spreading AIDS awareness.

“We were passionate about it when we wrote it, but we didn’t expect to be representing it as much as we are,” Gurira said. “People tend to expect a lot of us. After they see the piece, they say, ‘You need to make sure that there are more black people in the audience; you need to do this and that.’ I say, ‘How about you work on that for me?’ As artists, this is our job, what you just saw. This is our piece of the puzzle.”

Still, Gurira realizes that being a spokeswoman comes with the territory. “One of the things that we hope the play will elaborate on and highlight is that AIDS is not an isolated, insular issue that can be addressed in a kind of black-and-white way,” Salter said. “It is intricately entangled in the daily lives of everyone, whether they are infected or distantly affected.”

In the play, Gurira’s main character, the successful working mother Abigail, is infected with HIV by a philandering husband. Gurira observed wryly that, while most audience members get the message, a few out there remain oblivious.

“In Zimbabwe, a man who was helping us with the technical elements of our show came up to me after the show and was commending me for coming back home with this story,” Gurira said. “And then, in the next breath, he asks me about the possibility of ‘hooking up’ with Nikkole. And this man was, indeed, married. I was like, ‘Dude, you have just commended me for telling a story about this same issue; now you want to ‘hook up’ with a girl half your age, and you’re married?’ It was just tragic.”

diane.haithman@latimes.com

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‘In the Continuum’

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Today, 8 p.m. No performance Thursday

Ends: Dec.10

Price: $20 to $40

Contact: (213) 628-2772, www.CenterTheatreGroup.org