Lavinia Dickinson

Lavinia is Emily's younger sister, the Dickinson daughter who actually wants what a nineteenth-century woman is supposed to want: a husband, a household, a place in society. She flits between suitors with theatrical enthusiasm, rolls her eyes at Emily's poetic moods, and treats courtship as the great sport of her young life.

The show could easily use Lavinia as a punchline, the silly sister set against Emily's genius, but Anna Baryshnikov plays her with such comic conviction that she becomes something funnier and truer: a girl performing romance as hard as Emily performs poetry. Her swooning is a joke that never quite curdles into contempt.