What if you worked in a service profession, and one day one of your regular customers stepped outside the comfort zone of your relationship? That’s the question pursued in Meghan Kennedy’s new play The Counter, now presented off-Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company.
Kennedy sets her play in a small town diner in upstate New York a few years ago. Katie (Susannah Flood), the proprietor, is serving Paul (Anthony Edwards), a regular who comes in every morning for coffee and a newspaper. They have reached a certain level of friendship in this comfortable rut. On one particular morning, Paul asks Katie for an unexpected and disturbing favor.
From this point on, The Counter becomes an increasingly intense battle of wills and philosophies between Katie and Paul. Both of them reluctantly relate their deepest hurts and losses.
Both of them keep the world at arm’s length. And both steadfastly refuse to take even the smallest steps through the open doors to possible relationships — Katie with a man from her past who persistently sends her concerned voicemails (voice provided by actor Will Brill), Paul with the town doctor, Peg (Amy Warren), a lonely married woman with whom he once had an affair.
There is not an ounce of dramatic fat on this play. Kennedy starts out slowly, patiently building the details of the day-to-day diner routine. But once Paul asks his favor, the writing becomes more concise, more intensely powerful.
Award-winning director David Cromer, here making his Roundabout debut, skillfully guides Edwards and Flood into revealing their characters’ fears and rationales in a natural flow. The natural feeling is enhanced by Walt Spangler’s set, a utilitarian gray and chrome diner, colorless and lifeless, yet filled with more than enough details to cement the reality of this place. It is lit by Stacey Derosier partially by overhead fluorescent lights, another realistic detail.
It is to Roundabout Theatre Company’s credit that they commissioned Meghan Kennedy to write The Counter. It is a serious character study of two lonely people forging a friendship from routine encounters, in all its messy, hopeful glory, warts and all. It deserves to be seen, and it deserves to be re-seen — it is just that good. I strongly recommend taking the trip to the off-Broadway Laura Pels Theatre to stop in at The Counter.
The Counter is presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the Laura Pels Theatre in the Harold & Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, 111 West 46th St., in New York through Nov. 17, 2024. For more information, or to purchase tickets, go to roundabouttheatre.org or call 212-719-1300.
