Theatre in Review: The Call (Playwrights Horizons/Primary Stages)

	Kelly AuCoin and Kerry Butler. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

A couple's decision to adopt opens up a soul-shaking world of anxiety and icy truths in The Call. Frustrated at their inability to conceive a child, Annie and Peter decide to adopt. Young, intelligent, and solidly middle-class, they seem like first-class parent prospects. Their first attempt goes awry, however, when the birth mother changes her mind at the last moment; stung by the experience, they make a snap decision to look abroad, working with an African agency. "We'll have to deal with everyone thinking we're making a baby-fashion statement," says the initially skeptical Peter. "There're over 50 million orphans in Africa. I doubt they feel like fashion statements," replies Annie. But what seems like an act of altruism begins to take on a very different cast when complications set in.

It's part of the cunning methodology of the playwright, Tanya Barfield, that Africa is already very much on the characters' minds. The play begins on a note of brittle comedy, with Annie and Peter, who are white, hosting dinner for their friends Rebecca and Drea, black lesbians, who are offering the comic highlights of the accident-prone South African safari from which they have just returned. We also learn that Peter, as a student, traveled to the continent with Rebecca's older brother, who contracted the malaria that led to his early death. Hovering on the sidelines is Annie and Peter's new next-door neighbor, Alemu, an engineer from Africa.

In these early scenes, Barfield pulls off an elegant fake-out, intimating that The Call is going to be about racial divisions among the two couples. Stirring them up with uninhibited fervor is Drea, to whom tact is a stranger. (Not helping matters is the fact that both Drea and Annie are visual artists and just a little competitive.) While trying out various names for their potential daughter-to-be, Drea stops the conversation cold by asking, in cutting tones, "Isn't she gonna come with a name?" She also says, in a not-entirely-friendly way, "All I'm saying is there are a helluva lot of black kids here. Why's everyone got to go running to Africa?" The verbal fencing between Kerry Butler's Annie and Crystal A. Dickinson's Drea is one of the high points of Leigh Silverman's production.

But such remarks only constitute the curtain raiser for the play's real conflict, which comes into relief when the adoption is approved -- Annie and Peter learn that, instead of the infant they were expecting, the girl is really two-and-a-half; in the photo that arrives, she appears to be four. Suddenly, despite the fact that the girl has only a dying grandfather to care for her, Annie has second thoughts. She tries to explain her hesitation, saying, "I'll live in another woman's shadow, a part of me will always be in that shadow." Or, as the normally affable Alemu, sums it up, "You want a child from Africa but you do not want Africa."

The first act of The Call is near-perfect, neatly layering sharp-eyed comedy with heartfelt drama and neatly reframing the black-white conflict of the early scenes as one of Westerners (of all races) who treat Africa as a kind of natural resource -- for anything from a luxury trip to a source of children -- while skillfully avoiding the uglier realities of dictators and rampant disease. Rebecca and Drea, who are both relatively light-skinned, are horrified to discover while on vacation in Africa that they are seen by the locals as white people. When Alemu, in a neighborly gesture, drops off a Bundt cake, both Rebecca and Drea are afraid to eat it. Rebecca is the first to suggest that Annie might not want to proceed with the adoption.

The second act isn't nearly as smooth, in large part because of Barfield's treatment of Alemu, who, among other things, bombards Annie and Peter with goods -- syringes, soccer balls -- to be distributed in Africa, and who spins a long folk tale to shore up Annie's sagging resolve about adoption. Alemu is rather fuzzily conceived -- all we learn is that his father was a doctor and he is the only survivor among his immediate family -- a strategy that leaves him perilously close to being a "magical Negro," assigned to be the conscience of the white characters. Peter and Annie's final decision, not to be revealed here, doesn't feel totally believable, depending as it does on one character's rather surprising change of heart. Even so, the second act has its moments, especially when Peter finally reveals the details of the death of Rebecca's brother, a sequence that weaves together the play's various conflicts -- black vs. white, gay vs. straight, and First vs. Third World -- into a powerful climax.

Happily Silverman's taut direction keeps the action tense throughout, and her cast is thoroughly first-rate. Knowing Butler only as a sly musical theatre comedienne doesn't prepare one for her ability to juggle Annie's conflicting emotions -- her craving to be a mother versus her fear that she may make a choice that will cause her life to spin out of control. I hope more casting directors consider her for dramatic roles. As stylish, thoroughly modern Rebecca, Eisa Davis is almost unrecognizable from the mannered '50s housewife she created only a few weeks ago in Kirsten Greenidge's Luck of the Irish. Dickinson's wicked way with a line and her skill at deflating any pretension are extremely helpful here. (Letting slip that she and Rebecca got married, she instantly dismantles the other's joy by snapping, "It was mostly a political thing.") Kelly AuCoin's Peter is a finely judged portrait of the kind of guy who thinks it is his job to keep his marriage on an even keel at all times. Russell G. Jones' larger-than-life exuberance goes a long way toward explaining why Alemu is both a good friend to have and a little bit of a pain.

Adding a welcome touch of invention is Rachel Hauck's turntable-based set, which shows us Peter and Annie's apartment from different angles and also reveals the nursery waiting for a child to inhabit it; the set, which is lit by Matt Frey with subtle artistry, also stands in neatly for a gallery and a public park. Emily Rebholz's costumes are fine character studies in themselves. And Jill BC DuBoff's sound design deliver the pizzicato strings and piano passages heard between scenes as well as various ambient effects.

The Call isn't a perfect piece of work, but it is a smart and funny one that makes a stark and generally clear-eyed point about the gap between the luxury of our lives (so embedded that we barely acknowledge it) and the unimaginable poverty elsewhere in the world. As Barfield understands, nothing can happen until we see what is happening all around us; that's the first step.--David Barbour