Chicago Tribune - Somewhat Recommended
"..."Kin" is not without interest. Its themes and ideas stick with you. And there are committed performances from the grounded likes of Ann Sonneville, who plays a struggling young actress named Helena and John Fenner Mays, who plays a wound-tight colonel floating around a familial world that military values cannot control. McLeod, a promising young director, threw herself into the play's structure and world; now she needs to cultivate a lighter, more counter-intuitive touch (there is more humor in the play than this production finds), and get all her performers to voyage far outside their comfort zones and back to each other."
Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended
"... ‘Kin,” the title of London-born, New York-based playwright Bathsheba Doran’s play — seen Off Broadway last year and now receiving an impressively acted Chicago debut by Griffin Theatre — may seem simple enough to define. But check for precise definitions via both Wikipedia (which thoughtfully notes that “kinship is a term with various meanings depending upon the context”), and the dictionary (“a person’s relatives, collectively,” or “a group of persons descended from a common ancestor or constituting a family, clan, tribe, or race”), and you will see how complicated it can be."
Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended
"...Susan Monts-Bologna is heartbreaking and hilarious playing Linda, the aforementioned agoraphobe, as she unpeels the layers of the horrific incident that precipitated her condition. In fact there's solid work throughout the ensemble. And Scott Davis's set—a dining room surrounded by marsh grasses—captures the mystery-in-mundanity at the heart of Doran's world."
Windy City Times - Recommended
"...The evolution of these pilgrims doomed to waffle in indecision and misunderstanding spans seven years and two countries—or so we are told, since the demarcations on Scott Davis' open-plan stage are as nebulous as the chronology of its inhabitants' progress, though Kathy Logelin's dialect instruction provides welcome geographical context. Under Jess McLeod's direction, a cast of hard-working actors mine their roles for psychological subtext, creating personalities ultimately sparking our sympathies, despite the exasperation engendered by Doran's affinity for therapyspeak. (Having rejected the word "crazy" for the gentler "troubled," Anna triumphantly declares herself, "fragile—but not troubled.")"
Time Out Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...Director Jess McLeod imbues her production with sensitivity and grace. As each of the play’s 21 scenes unfolds, Scott Davis’s clever open-set design allows inactive characters to remain in the periphery, partially hidden but not out of sight. It’s a striking metaphor for the way our kin, present or not, weigh on our lives."
ChicagoCritic - Highly Recommended
"...There’s the family we get and the family we make, and Kin has the audacious goal of studying that dynamic from the inside out. It does this more successfully than not—and not without a deference to those aforementioned performances, staging and direction. All endings are beginnings for this constellation. With plenty of insight, humor and honesty, Kin is a sympathetic look at the ties that bind and also set us free."
Chicago Stage and Screen - Recommended
"...It takes some time to get used to “Kin,” an utterly—but slowly—engaging feast of characters. Now in a perfectly sculpted and fully felt Midwest premiere from Griffin Theatre Company, Bathsheba Doran’s much-praised drama jumps across seven years as it lovingly chronicles the culture-clashing affair and marriage between unlikely lovers—Anna, an American scholar of Keats’ punctuation and Sean, an Irish personal trainer and self-help enthusiast."
