Review: THE CALL at TheaterWorks

Though it opens with a burst of convivial laughter at a dinner party for two couples who are long-time friends in an upscale New York apartment, this play takes up thorny topical issues around international and cross-racial adoption that are no laughing matter.

Playwright Tanya Barfield, educated at NYU and Juilliard, populates her play with an assemblage of seven characters, five of whom we meet, and two of whom are unseen offstage presences, each enigmatic in their own way, and both central to the story.

Hosting the dinner party are the central couple of Annie (Mary Bacon) and Peter (Todd Gearhart). White and affluent, they have an announcement to make to their guests, Rebecca (Jasmin Walker) and Drea (Maechi Aharanwa), recently married African-American lesbians just back from a honeymoon safari in Africa. The two couples have long ties: Annie and Drea are both artists who know each other's work; Peter was close friends with Rebecca's older brother David years ago.

Rebecca and Drea greet the news that Annie and Peter have decided to adopt a baby from Africa with congratulations and celebration, though it's not hard to guess that troubling complications (ethical and racial ones, on top of the inherent complications in adoption and in parenting however achieved) will likely ensue.

And so they do. Furthermore, Barfield has supplied a fifth character, a neighbor named Alemu (Michael Rogers). Alemu is an African immigrant who has not fully assimilated to US culture but also has no plans to return to his country of origin. He may, in fact, be a survivor of trauma. Still, he wants to send various goods back home with Peter and Annie when they go to fetch their child. He's both pushy and courtly, which leaves all of the other characters ill at ease. He is a living reminder of the potential 'otherness' of the child to come that Annie and Peter, at least, seem to be trying to ignore.

That child is, of course, one of the aforementioned influential off-stage presences. The other is the memory of David, Rebecca's older brother and Peter's friend, deceased. How he died is a late revelation in the play's events.

This is a lot to pack into one play, and while Barfield's script works to avoid over-simplification, I couldn't help but feel that she might have been able to do more justice to the complexities she wants to address had she reduced the factors at work by one -- say, David's demise. Nonetheless, the play warrants respect for foregrounding crucial issues that involve us all, whether we want to admit it or not. What I found most moving, which is a credit to the writing and to sympathetic non-verbal work by actor Jasmin Walker, was the depiction of a cross-racial friendship between two women that survives despite considerable stress. We need models of such loyalty in the face of difference.

The Theaterworks production is directed by Jenn Thompson, herself the white mother of a child adopted from Ethiopia. Mary Bacon, playing the central role of Annie, has also adopted a child from that country. This gives the Hartford production an authenticity and a heartfelt quality that cannot be overlooked.

The play is ably performed and well staged. It makes no ill-advised stabs at neat resolution, but surely raises timely and vital issues. THE CALL runs in Hartford through June 19.

photo by Lenny Nagler

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