Jennifer Shin, a part-time case manager at a battered women’s shelter by day, transforms herself into an obsessive-compulsive agoraphobic every weekend. The 26-year-old is an actress who trained at the prestigious Steppenwolf Theatre Company and has landed what she calls the role of a lifetime. At the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, Shin becomes Jennifer Marcus, 22, a Chinese adoptee with a mild case of Tourette’s syndrome who rocks out to electric guitar music whenever she’s excited.

The two personas could not be further apart, yet when Shin steps onto the stage to perform the title role in “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow: An Instant Message with Excitable Music,” it’s hard to tell where she ends and Marcus begins.

“Shin launches into Jennifer like an actress possessed,” wrote the Chicago Tribune in a March review. “Her work is not only every bit as frenetic, smart and endlessly compelling as the character requires, but also reveals a deeply empathetic character. And that’s why this show is so darn good.”

“The Intelligent Design,” written by Rolin Jones, follows Marcus, a tech genius whose agoraphobia doesn’t allow her to leave the house. Determined to meet her biological mother in China, she creates a robot named Jenny Chow (played by Mia Park) to be her eyes and ears for the fateful meeting. Through this plot, the complicated mother-daughter relationship is explored as well as an internal battle over feelings of inadequacy.

“I think anyone can understand that; the ideas of identity are universal,” says Shin.

Audience members often come up after the show to share their stories and insecurities with Shin, who was born and raised in Chicago and whose first contact with her character’s disorders was through research on Wikipedia.

“That’s what I love about theater,” Shin says. “I can be different people and live different lives. The community and sense of connection I have with the audience is so rare.”

Shin says it is the reason why she is so committed to pursuing acting at all: The power of performance can move an audience to relate to an agoraphobic in some form or another because everyone has felt “ugly” and “worthless” at some point.

“I’ve never had a role like this before, and it’s the greatest thing,” Shin says. “Where else can someone be a complete stranger, and two hours later, you feel that kind of communication and connection? It’s a gift for me that it has that kind of effect on people.”

Shin first got hit by the acting bug at the University of Illinois in Chicago. It was a newfound passion her mother disapproved of and that caused their relationship to disintegrate. They haven’t spoken in eight years.

Luckily, Shin’s father, who lives in Seoul, has provided unconditional support. “He was incredibly excited and proud to see my film [“Second Moon”] at the Pusan Film Festival,” Shin says. “He was more excited than me, I think. He found ways to casually slip it into any conversation with anyone he talked to and bragged. It was a nice feeling.”