*

Playwright Tanya Barfield — whose new work, The Call, a co-production between Playwrights Horizons and Primary Stages, is playing at PH's Peter Jay Sharp Theater on West 42nd Street — began her career in the theatre as an actress. She might have started applying pen to paper earlier if only she had known that was an option for the living.

"I thought that all playwrights were dead," says Barfield. "I probably would have discovered playwriting first had I known that [it] was something that a person could do. So I went to acting school [instead]."

The Call, about a white couple considering whether or not to adopt an African child, is Barfield's first new play in a few years. During that period of literary inactivity, Barfield herself went through the drama of new parenthood, adopting two children. When she returned to the keypad, she discovered that the shift in her life had caused her to evolve as a writer.

"I took a few years off playwriting to be a mom," she explained. "Then, when I came back to writing after that, I didn't realize that I had actually changed on the inside and I thought I could keep writing the plays that I always wrote. And it didn't work out for me and I got writer's block. I spent a couple years with writer's block, trying to be a mom and writing plays that were not really what I wanted to be writing. I guess I realized I was resisting the plays that I was actually supposed to be writing. Similarly to the way the character Annie in the play is struggling with adoption, I was struggling with writing."