Divided, disconnected

Anna didn’t get her wish. She wanted to write her doctoral dissertation on punctuation in Emily Dickenson’s poems but couldn’t. So she wrote on how John Keats punctuated his.

Bathsheba Doran’s Kin begins with Anna’s self-important professor, Simon, breaking off their relationship because they can’t be “truthful” with each other. “I know what I’m looking for,” he says with Phi Beta Kappa entitlement, “and it’s not you.”

Dis- and missed-connections run throughout this hour and 45-minute one act. And yet all the characters are, in some senses, related, though by many degrees of separation.

Anna rises in public, but falls in private. She lands a fine teaching post, meets and eventually will marry sensitive Sean, but she has grave uncertainties. So does Sean, who can’t quite forget Rachel and who asks “how do you know she’s the right fish?”

Similar to Hermia and Helena in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Anna and seemingly cursed Helena (in Shakespeare and Doran) teeter-totter: as one rises, the other falls. And vice versa in the end?

The playwright includes satellite links, all of whom waver as well: Anna’s estranged father; his mistress Kay, now dying of cancer; and Sean’s stranded mother. Some connect, others fray.

Doran tells the story in a series of short scenes, often between two characters. The times and fortunes change, but not the people. As the tapestry unfolds, it becomes clear that the characters are as disconnected within as without.

Except for the sudden appearance of a bear — a la Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale? — the action of Kin takes place in the exchanges, often at cross purposes, of the characters. Some scenes spark, others don’t. The play and the Ion Theatre production intrigue more than they move or excite.

The acting, even in Claudio Raygoza’s expert hands, is uneven at best. There’s often a sense of a scene being “acted” — now I speak, now you — rather than lived by actual beings. A sense of dimension is often missing. An exception is Donal Pugh’s Adam, a military man who has done many a classified assignment, but whose daughter, Anna, is a closed-case to him.

Best of show: recent Craig Noel Award-winner Hannah Logan gets to roam all over the map as Helena. At least twice as lively as the rest of the cast, and equal parts funny, spacey, in Logan’s terrific performance she’s the person always left standing, in musical chairs, when the music stops.

Rhianna Basore makes the most out of Anna. As much a thesis on the divided self as a character, Anna delivers the Author’s Message: “It’s awful, isn’t it? Getting to know someone.”