Tanya Barfield is often asked if her plays are autobiographical. "That assumption is reductive," she said, despite situations that have, at least apparently, parallels to her life. "Maybe it's odd that I'm surprised that I get this reaction," Barfield said, recalling a solo show in which one of the characters she created is named Danny Chew, and to whom the primary character is unkind. "Someone came up to me and said, 'I want to go find Danny Chew,' and I said, 'What are you talking about? There is no Danny Chew.' They felt betrayed."
That piece was Without Skin or Breathlessness, a one-woman play that introduced Barfield in 1996 to audiences for the first time as a writer as well as a performer. That primary character is a white mother reflecting on the life of her biracial child. Barfield could be that daughter given her own parental situation, but she said it's not about her or her mother. And in The Call, a recent play coming to Theatre Rhino, a childless couple struggles with the implications of adopting a child from Africa. Barfield could be part of that couple, but said no, it's not at all her on stage.
"One of the reasons why it took so long before I even thought of writing the play is because I wanted to make sure I wasn't writing about myself," Barfield said of The Call. "I tend to feel people own their own stories, so I wouldn't want to tell someone else's story."
She includes her own life among the stories not to be tapped. Barfield and her partner are raising two adopted children �" born in Ethiopia, according to Out magazine �" but she has put them off-limits to herself as source material for her plays, and off-limits to any journalist who inquires. "I don't mean to be rude," she said, "but the one thing I always tell journalists is that I'm not going discuss my kids. I don't want to make their lives the subject of my art."
In The Call, which begins performances Feb. 20 at the Eureka Theatre, married couple Annie and Peter, who had other priorities until the biological clock ran out, choose to pursue adoption. Annie decides that orphaned African children are most at need, and the machinery is set in motion. The couple's best friends, a black lesbian couple, are skeptical about this decision, from Rebecca's strictly emotional reaction to Drea's more complicated political point of view.
"One day she may wonder why she can't wash and wash and scrub the brown off her," says Drea. "You just have to know it's going to happen." And when a photo arrives showing a child who looks closer to 4 than the toddler Annie and Peter were expecting, Annie is unhappy that she probably won't be the only mother the child remembers.
Because Barfield is circumspect about many personal matters, it's hard to know how she, a biracial woman, and her partner, a white woman, have navigated any rough waters in adoption that her characters are facing. "I think in all of my plays there is some truth that I understand," she said, signaling the boundaries to talk of specific personal inspiration.
But Barfield, born in San Francisco and now living in New York, is happy to discuss her playwriting process in more general terms. "I believe that theater should ultimately feel like some sort of confession," she said. "You have to feel like you're living inside the characters' souls, and plays are not about the everyday aspects of one's soul. I'm not interested in writing about the easy parts of the characters' lives."
The Call, which debuted in New York in 2013, marked a return to playwriting for Barfield, who used a period of writer's block to spend time being a mother. Before that period, Barfield wrote The Blue Door, about a man coming to terms with his blackness; Berkeley Rep staged it in 2007. Her most recent play is Bright Half Life, recently produced by the Magic Theatre, which jumps through time for looks at a long-term relationship between two women that has ended in acrimony and divorce. "It's a lot of short scenes, but it's not like TV in that way," she said. "I used to tell my students, 'Don't write me scenes like they've been written on Twitter. Give me 10 pages, give me 20 pages, give me a real scene.'"
Barfield has since gained firsthand knowledge about writing for television. She is one of the staff writers on the fourth season of the FX series The Americans, about Soviet spies posing as happy suburbanites during the Cold War. Her work will be seen beginning in March when the series returns to television.
"There is a team of writers, and you all brainstorm to come up with a basic outline of where the story is heading, and then you divide up and write individual episodes. The showrunner tells me what he ultimately wants from me, and then you write it, he rewrites it, and then you rewrite it some more. So it is completely unlike theater."
Barfield says there is no way, at least at this point in her career, that she could make enough money to raise a family strictly through playwriting. In a way, she said, television helps subsidize the theater. "It's a wonderful way to make a living, which is also writing, telling dramatic stories, and that's what I'm interested in, even if it is so different from theater."
She only has ideas swimming inside her head for what may become her next play. "I hate selling myself," she said. "Once you're done with a play, you have to market it and yourself, and I find that so exhausting and disheartening and demoralizing that it sometimes make me not want to write. So there are even times when I'm trying to sell myself to myself."
As for the actual process of putting words on paper, she said, "I love it when I'm in the zone. I think I am both happy and have a level of discontent. I want to be working more, working harder, and working at a different level. But that discontent is something I use to keep me striving."
The Call will run Feb. 20-March 12 at the Eureka Theatre. For tickets, call (800) 838-3006 or go to therhino.org.