There aren’t many plays that can simultaneously pull off raucous comedy, poignant emotion — and the most memorable encounter with a bear since “The Winter’s Tale.”
But “Kin,” which opened last night at Playwrights Horizons, does all that and more, establishing its young British playwright, Bathsheba Doran, as a major talent.
On the surface, “Kin” — set in New York, where Doran’s settled for the last decade — is a romantic comedy, depicting the courtship between Anna (Kristen Bush) and Sean (Patch Darragh). She’s a 30-something scholar who’s spent the last five years working on a book about punctuation in the poetry of John Keats; he’s a personal trainer who’s moved here from Ireland.
Their burgeoning relationship, about which each has considerable doubts, is observed from the sidelines by a gallery of eccentric supporting characters.
Those in Anna’s orbit are her best friend, Helena (the hilarious Laura Heisler), a supremely self-absorbed, mostly unemployed actress, and Adam (Cotter Smith), her emotionally reticent, military-officer father.
Sean’s kin consist of his relatives back home in Ireland: his needy mother (Suzanne Bertish) and his uncle (Bill Buell), whose training session on a treadmill is one of the play’s best scenes. “Isn’t this just a metaphor for life?” he asks, panting. “You sweat and you strain and you still end up in the same place.”
Tracing the shifting emotional trajectories of the two families, “Kin” features both beautifully observed characters and rudely funny dialogue. Starting with the painfully funny opening scene, in which Anna’s unceremoniously dumped by the older professor who is her lover, the play’s tonal shifts are expertly handled. Helena’s riotous run-in with a bear in the woods, for instance, is immediately followed by a deeply moving encounter between Anna’s father and Sean’s mother when the latter reveals a horrific event from her past.
Under the superb direction of Sam Gold (“Circle Mirror Transformation”), the ensemble delivers vividly memorable performances. By the time “Kin” concludes, on a stormy Irish cliff, you’ll fall in love with these wildly disparate characters, who’ve managed, despite the differences between them, to become family.