In the Continuum at Pegasus Players
★★★☆☆
Pegasus Players (see Resident companies). By Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter. Dir. Ilesa Duncan. With Sam Bailey, Ashleigh LaThrop. 1hr 30mins; no intermission.
In this 2005 piece, originally performed by authors Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter, two black women in very different social situations find themselves on parallel tracks. Abigail (Sam Bailey) is a married, upwardly mobile mom in Zimbabwe; Nia (Ashleigh LaThrop) is a 19-year-old American “hood rat” living in a halfway house and counting on the hot-shit basketball recruit she’s dating to give her a new life. The two women find their personal narratives interrupted when they learn they’re both pregnant and HIV-positive.
In Gurira and Salter’s thoughtful,unsentimental plotting, both performers play multiple figures in their base characters’ lives as we see how, despite their very different starting points, their options are similarly throttled by their diagnoses. Unlike many monologue-based pieces, In the Continuum smartly puts the performers always in conversation with another, unseen character rather than having them address us directly. Director Ilesa Duncan manages the two-way traffic well as Bailey and LaThrop flip from role to role with a simple retying of costume designer Christine Pascual’s brightly colored scarves. LaThrop shows particularly impressive range in embodying Nia’s worn-down mother, a cousin who recommends cashing in and the basketball star’s pragmatic parent.—Kris Vire
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