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Calls to Blood
“I’ve got a great idea for a play”: It’s a phrase that can evoke dread at social gatherings and El platforms alike. Lots of people have nuggets of experience that could presumably anchor a drama, but not many of them have Asmus’s technical chops. In his new play, Chicagoan-turned-Angeleno Asmus uses an improbable but apparently true scenario to demonstrate his gift for capturing the rhythms of contemporary talk. Tracking a couple whose attempts to conceive a child lead them to some unhappy places, Calls to Blood is at its best in the interplay among its characters, whether the intimate struggles of Alison (Gitenstein) and Jacob (Tiedemann) or the snappy banter of best friends Kirk (a very funny Linder) and Suellen (Inboden).
That snappy banter, on the other hand, reflects one of the piece’s limitations: While, at their strongest, the wisecracking best friends seem plucked from a Lincoln Park nightspot, they’re also torn from the same cloth as such sitcom icons as Rhoda Morgenstern and Maynard G. Krebs. On the whole, Calls to Blood plays it a little safe, relying on the shock of its underlying reveal to set it apart without fully exploring the implications for its characters; Alison and Jacob remain nice people trapped in a bad situation. But the New Colony’s fierce production transcends the scenario’s slick contours. As Alison, Gitenstein brings a breathtaking passion to the stage; torn apart by what she learns, Gitenstein manages to lift the play from its true-story origins to true art.
