Ben
Brantley

July 21, 2015

Two of the three characters in “Kinship,” Carey Perloff’s heavy-breathing drama at the Williamstown Theater Festival about a hard-driving newspaper editor who is ambushed by passion, say they’d do pretty much anything to avoid seeing a play. And you have to admit they have a point. You see, when the man and woman identified in the program only as She and He reluctantly take in an evening of theater, their lives inexorably begin to imitate what they’ve seen onstage. Which would be merely irritating if the play had been, say, a Neil Simon comedy. But instead, She (Cynthia Nixon), a high-powered journalist with an ideal husband and children to match, and He (Chris Lowell), a cub reporter in her employ, have the misfortune to run smack into Racine’s “Phèdre.” And as fine a specimen of classic French tragedy as “Phèdre” may be, you could never say it provides healthy role models for a middle-aged woman and a younger man on the brink of beginning an affair.