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| Photo By Sandy Underwood |
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Nikkole Salter (left) and Tinashe Kajese star in the
Playhouse's In the Continuum.
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Among the several extraordinary things about
In The Continuum, which is opening the new Shelterhouse Theatre season at the Cincinnati Playhouse, is its uncommon structure. Two actresses -- Nikkole Salter (who is also one of the play's authors) and Tinashe Kajese -- appear as the play's primary women, Nia and Abigail, respectively, and as a number of other people: friends, family members, colleagues and mothers -- especially mothers. The two speak a series of separate, often confrontational, often angry, often deeply wounded, occasionally mordantly funny, always electrifying monodramas that gradually entwine themselves and the audience with them.
Nia and Abigail never "see" each other. Their monodramas -- not monologues spoken directly to the audience -- overlap but they do not interact except in brief transitions when a parting thought from one woman will echo ironically in the other's opening words. Layer after layer the monodramas strip away the cultural and geographic differences that separate fledgling teenage poet Nia (in South Central Los Angeles) and television news anchor Abigail (in Harare, Zimbabwe) to reveal their core similarities.
Both women are pregnant. Neither pregnancy was planned. Or welcomed. Both women have been infected with the HIV virus as a result of their partner's carelessness. And arrogance. New lives are beginning. Other lives will be ending prematurely and in enormous pain.
Unplanned, unwanted pregnancy and HIV/AIDS are rampant, continuing scourges in black America and in sub-Saharan Africa. The play's enthralling characters illustrate that, but it single-mindedly remains a play, never a tract. Wisely, Salter and co-author Danai Gurira leave the horrifying statistics to their program notes and the play's harrowing reflection of real life to each audience member's subsequent contemplation.
The women's monodramas are halves of involved, highly personal, generally impassioned one-on-one conversations. Nia and Abigail speak to people who have impact on their lives. Other characters speak to them. So extraordinary are the writing and the performances that the audience can all but hear the responding voice, certainly can intuit what the other person is saying.
The monodramas are made even more real and imperative by the absence of clumsy exposition. It might take a few lines for the audience member to sort out who's being addressed, but that serves to increase tension and dramatic validity. When Nia speaks to her best friend or her mother or her boyfriend's mother, we see and hear Nia directly while "hearing" the other person. Likewise when Abigail speaks to a rather grandiose colleague or to her beloved child.
More importantly, when other characters are in view, speaking to Nia and Abigail, we still "see" and "hear" amplifying reflections of Nia and Abigail.
It's extraordinary play-crafting supported by extraordinary acting. Salter demands and wins empathy for a loud, mouthy, self-absorbed child-woman who lives by and within her senses. Kajese makes both vulnerable and admirable a polished careerist who crumbles, rages and ultimately shoulders a crushing burden.
The play's back-story is hardly less extraordinary. While students in a graduate acting program at New York University, Salter and Gurira began developing separate but similar solo performance pieces. A teacher noted the parallelisms and suggested they blend their work for increased impact.
They did. It worked.
They opened a successful off-Broadway run of the piece a little over a year ago. The New York Times named it one of the year's 10 best. Since the New York stand, Salter and Gurira played the show in Europe and in Africa. Atypically the Playhouse imported the production more or less intact, employing the same director (Robert O'Hara) and design team. Grade: A
IN THE CONTINUUM, presented by Playhouse in the Park, continues through Oct. 29.
