You’ve felt “The Call” before.
This is another one of those intimate contemporary dramas where a difficult, topical cultural issue affects the lives of slightly-outside-the-mainstream characters and their families. Recent examples include “Disgraced” and “Bad Jews” at Long Wharf, “Familiar” and “War” at the Yale Rep.
The issue is roundly debated for two acts. Voices are raised, personal secrets are revealed, lives are altered. Such plays usually end in a quiet, sweet resolution, but really only for the characters in the play.
In “The Call,” at TheaterWorks in Hartford through June 19, the issue is adoption.
In the first scene, Annie and Peter (white, married, in their late 30s) are intent on becoming parents, as they explain to their friends Drea and Rebecca (African-American, engaged). Their only option is adoption, and after a quick checklist of why other countries are more difficult to adopt from, they decide to adopt a child from Africa, where Peter served in the Peace Corps and where Drea and Rebecca just happened to have traveled to for a safari.
“The Call” then becomes a series of unpredictable, often awkward interactions. Annie and Peter share their dreams and doubts, though one may be dreaming while the other doubts. Drea and Rebecca return throughout the play to offer comments, welcome or otherwise, on their friends’ efforts to adopt. There are complications. There are hesitations. There’s even a whole other character, a neighbor who comes from Africa and visits with bags of shoes, soccer balls and syringes for Peter and Annie to bring to his homeland when they go to pick up their child.
Watching all these well-intentioned, flawed, human, impulsive, argumentative, sensitive, gracious, defensive and/or downright selfish calls and responses, it’s easy to dismiss the central concerns of the play with a simple, “Well, if it were happening to me, I wouldn’t behave that way.”
But if the play doesn’t work as a morality lesson or as a lecture on human rights, it fares better as a drama, since it’s not easy to predict the behavior of the characters. Barfield’s pretty savvy at making tense situations tenser by placing them in unusual environments — the opening of a gallery exhibit, picking up poop at a dog park.
As Annie, Mary Bacon behaves outwardly chipper and inwardly vulnerable. She telegraphs the psychological strain she’s under by maintaining a fixed, tight, unconvincing smile. Todd Gearhart makes Peter an upbeat nice guy who can raise Annie’s spirits but not allay her worries. The characters of Drea (Maechi Aharanwa) and Rebecca (Jasmin Walker) provide so much comic relief that they threaten to throw off the whole show; luckily the women recognize the boundaries of the script and the stage and don’t overstep. As the sullen, saintly neighbor Alemu, Michael Rogers is the polar opposite of Kramer from “Seinfeld”: His entrances slow the play’s tempo to a crawl, turning the drama darker and more worldly.
Luke Hegel-Cantarella’s set design switches from realistic to expressionistic with the same fluidity that the script shifts from current-events to comedy to melodrama. Director Jenn Thompson must contend with a rounded stage area where a lot of the action naturally gravitates toward smallish furniture in the middle of a room — a coffee table, a dining table, a crib. It gets crowded at times, and you can easily envision how this might play out more easily on a wider, squarer area.
But “The Call” is heard clearly enough at TheaterWorks, even if the play muddies its own message so much that it can’t be heeded.
THE CALL by Tanya Barfield, directed by Jenn Thompson, runs through June 19 at TheaterWorks, 233 Pearl St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $65, $15 for student rush. Information: 860-527-7838, theaterworkshartford.com
