Kin
Opening Night: March 21, 2011
Closing: April 17, 2011
Theater: Playwrights Horizons
Anna (Kristen Elizabeth Bush), an Ivy League poetry scholar, and Sean (Patch Darragh), an Irish personal trainer, hardly seem destined for one another. But as their web of disparate family and friends crosses great distances – both psychologically and geographically – an unlikely new family is forged. Bathsheba Doran’s play sheds a sharp light on the changing face of kinship in the expansive landscape of the modern world.
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March 21, 2011
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.
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March 22, 2011
On paper, Bathsheba Doran’s Kin might not look like much: After years of checkered romantic pasts, poetry scholar Anna (Kristen Bush) and Irish physical trainer Sean (Patch Darragh) date, drift into love and eventually marry in his native country. Their screwed-up family members get acquainted and partly heal from contact with one another. Geographic and emotional gulfs are crossed by triumphant love. Don’t let the rom-com ready-made scare you away; Kin is darker and weirder than this description suggests. And Sam Gold’s ideally cast, coolly abstracted staging will lodge itself in your mind long after you’ve seen it.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 22, 2011
Bathsheba Doran’s new play "Kin" is a beautifully developed portrait of how our friends and families shape who we are and even who we love. The story revolves around Anna (Kristen Bush), an English professor at Columbia, and Sean (Patch Darragh), an Irish immigrant and personal trainer.
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March 22, 2011
Patch Darragh and Kristen Bush in Kin
(© Joan Marcus)
Patch Darragh and Kristen Bush in Kin
(© Joan Marcus)
Familial relationships — both biological and of the sort that people create for themselves with their friends and partners — are explored with gentle and thoughtful compassion in Bathsheba Doran’s Kin, now receiving a terrifically acted production at Playwrights Horizons.
March 21, 2011
Bathsheba Doran’s play "Kin" is a bit of a mess, but in this case that’s a good thing. This intricate, multilayered comedy-drama follows the untidy fallout that occurs when two disparate people hook up. By painstakingly examining the impact of the romance on the couple’s families and friends in all its confusing and ambiguous detail, Doran shows us the intricate web of connection that makes up a modern community. Along the way, the playwright also takes a look at how parents’ tragedies can affect their children’s lives, the demands and limits of friendship, the dangers of dating, and a dozen other themes. The result is a prismatic view of contemporary relationships, simultaneously funny and moving.
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