Actresses Kristen Bush and Laura Heisler in Kin. Photo Credit: Joan Marcus.

Recently, plays and performances have relied highly on their flashy costumes, sets, and scale to draw in audiences. From Spider-Man to Priscilla Queen of the Desert, it would seem that the theater world is saturated with spectacle. In spite of all this, a new play called Kin brings theater back to what it should be about: making real magic by getting real people in a room together and seeing what happens. The play is about the incidental relationships that form and coalesce when two people fall in love. Rather than using the couple in question to create the drama, Bathsheba Doran skillfully examines these side relationships, and writes quick and snappy dialogue that never manages to feel jarring. In the process, she creates a completely believable cast of characters whose back stories and life stories that audience cares, and even better, wants to know about.

Their stories are forever entwined, like the body of a knotty family tree. Anna and Shawn, our protagonists, never spend more than five minutes of this two hour show onstage together, so the audience gets to play detective and look more at Anna’s father and her crazy best friend, and Sean’s family in Ireland to ascertain what Anna and Shawn are like together.

What feels so breathtaking about this show is that there is no real “problem” per se, so each vignette of the story is treated with equal amounts of care by director Sam Gold. Even though none of these characters are that stereotypical, one could still find examples of these types of people in their daily lives. This ensemble of nine are adept at working off of each other which is crucial to Kin’s success. The acting had more layers to it than a giant wedding cake , even when it came to the play’s most neurotic characters. For a show that probably did not go through years of rehearsal, the depth the actors were able to accomplish is commendable.

Kin is funny, warm and touching without ever crossing into the dark side of melodrama. It constantly proves that real theater is alive and well Off Broadway, and that as long as you have a nimble storyteller, even the stories you thought you knew so well can always be turned on their heads.