With their twirly stools, chipped mugs and napkin contraptions, old-fashioned diners are apparently dying out. But not onstage, where they solve a lot of playwriting problems.
Getting strangers to talk to each other? Easy: Waitress, meet customer. Motivating random pop-ins and exits? Jingle the door and pay the bill. Signal “America” without having to say it? The Bunn-O-Matic might as well be a flag.
All of those are ingredients in “The Counter,” a sweet but shaggy dramedy by Meghan Kennedy that opened Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The waitress is Katie (Susannah Flood): a big-city exile returning to her small-town home for reasons that emerge over the play’s 75 minutes. Her first customer, most days, is Paul (Anthony Edwards): a retired firefighter slumping onto his favorite stool for coffee and a lifeline of conversation.
Kennedy’s dialogue is piquant and suggestive but mechanically avoidant. Needing to hold back the play’s big events, she lets her characters spend most of its first third dropping bread crumbs of information and noodling amusingly around the edges of not much. Paul has trouble sleeping and is a cinephile. Katie prefers Netflix. Both, it’s clear, if only by the impenetrable fog on the windows, are lost and lonely, in a way we are meant to understand as American.
The banality of all that is undercut, in David Cromer’s typically thoughtful staging, by hints that the story will soon be heading sideways. That’s literally true of Walt Spangler’s set, which orients the title character — the counter — perpendicular to the audience, so we see the divide between Katie and Paul at all times. At some point, each also gets a private soliloquy, with lighting (by Stacey Derosier) and sound (by Christopher Darbassie) altered to indicate interiority.
But these breaks in the production’s otherwise closely observed naturalism — including hoodies, plaids and puffers by Sarah Laux — come off as passing tics, especially in comparison to the plot’s wackadoodle bombshell, which distorts the rest of the play.
The twist arises out of Paul’s overture of friendship: a relationship, as he defines it, that moves beyond the confines of two-sugars chitchat to invigorating surprises and challenging “tough talk.” When Katie warily and not very credibly agrees, he suggests they begin by sharing secrets, a creaky old dramaturgical device. At first the secrets are distressingly mild. He’s a recovering alcoholic. (We know: Edwards’s body language has told us as much from the beginning.) And Katie has 27 voice mail messages saved on her phone.
When bigger secrets are soon divulged, a different problem emerges: They are so outlandish, and so obviously devised as complementary propositions, that you feel the play writing the characters instead of the other way around. Katie’s secret has left her believing she needs dependable routines to recover from chaos; that’s why she runs a diner. Paul’s has left him with the opposite despair: that everything will be horribly the same forever. In short, one’s meat patty is the other’s poison.
Such feelings do exist in the world, and the skill of the actors comes close to making them credible moment by moment. Edwards perhaps slathers the gloom too thickly but manages to make a cranky sad sack appealing. (Amy Warren is also pleasing in a brief role; Will Brill is an apt recorded voice.) But it’s Flood, superb most recently in “The Comeuppance” and “Make Believe,” who makes “The Counter” feel like a play, not an exercise. She seems to have pulled apart the components of each line and reassembled them into something richer than they were before.
Richness has not been lacking in Kennedy’s two previous major works, both of them produced, like this one, by the Roundabout Theater Company. “Too Much, Too Much, Too Many” was oversaturated with poetry and “Napoli, Brooklyn” hyperactive with symbols. Both nevertheless had scenes that soared, usually when the playwright dialed down the self-conscious expressiveness. Tennessee Williams is hard to pull off; even he couldn’t do it reliably.
“The Counter” laudably aims for greater spareness than those earlier plays; its best sustained moments are almost wordless. In shaping them, Cromer displays his usual directorial nerve, creating tension from time. At other points, though, his patience, which in fuller works allows feeling to emerge naturally and purely, can’t stop the story from drooping into skimpiness.
Still, you feel Kennedy working her way toward a profitable middle ground. (It’s heartening that even in a time of austerity, the Roundabout gives playwrights real opportunities to stretch.) But the middle ground is not a cleared counter, an emptiness between extremes; it’s a place where extremes clash credibly. “The Counter” achieves that only intermittently. The rest of the time it’s over too easy: well-done at the edges, runny in the middle.
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