(Charles Isherwood’s article appeared in The New York Times, 3/21.)
The truism that families come in all shapes and sizes is illuminated with haunting beauty in the new play “Kin,” by Bathsheba Doran. The daisy chain of relationships depicted in this exquisitely wrought comedy-drama, which opened on Monday night at Playwrights Horizons, moves through a couple of generations and across several American states and two countries. It might even be said to include a live bear and a dead dog.
But Ms. Doran’s elliptical collage of interconnected lives coheres to form a piercing portrait of the contemporary social architecture, in which the distance between people can be widened or collapsed with disorienting ease, whether it is through the click of a keyboard, a telephone conversation or a chance encounter. Many of the characters in the play never actually meet, and yet we come away with a moving sense of how each individual’s experience resonates — troublingly or happily — in the lives of almost everyone else.
Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/