urban excavations

The Counter
Featuring Anthony Edwards, Susanna Flood, and Amy Warren
Roundabout Theatre Company | Laura Pels
September 20, 2024 – November 17, 2024
production site

Two lonely people meet in a public community space — a park bench, a library, a movie theater, a bar, a diner. Here we are in the coffee-purveying option, allowing space and time to cradle the stories of isolated, grieving characters who may or may not find each other, who do and do not listen to each other, who, as the kids say today, “hold space” for each other. Meghan Kennedy’s newest play The Counter offers that public meeting place.

A script that spare, a production that is often quite silent, playwright Kennedy and director David Cromer craft in The Counter little movements that assuage and calm (the preparation of the coffee machine, wiping the counter, flipping the eggs — were there eggs? there ought to have been eggs). Despite a late entry appearance of a third character Dr. Peg Bradley (the always solid Amy Warren), this plays out essentially as an evocative two hander. Paul (Anthony Edwards) comes for breakfast at the same diner every day, and Katie (Susannah Flood), the younger waitress, sees Paul as a kind regular. When we meet them, they have been meeting in this way almost every day for two years. Paul wants to move past waitress-customer friendly to real friends, to share secrets and to offer his own: he is an alcoholic. Katie reveals she has moved to deal with her own broken heart from the city to the small upstate town where our diner is located. Paul then pushes their new openness to the next level to show his cards and his true agenda: he wants Katie to help him end his life by poisoning him, to surprise him with the timing of the action. He places the burden of deciding the timing of the end of his life on her.

This plot construction feels heavy handed, as heavy as an anvil, to animate the actions of the characters. Was the magnitude (and perhaps unbelievability) of this ask too much for this fragile twosome to withstand? The direction and acting in this production along with playwright Kennedy’s natural dialogue combats those structural weights with multi-layered characters that unfold organically as they grow closer and we get to know them over the play’s running time.

The direction by the always exquisite David Cromer shines here. He and the actors, as often is the case in his productions, craft potent wordless sequences that feel more choreography than direction, movement in space on a human scale. Set design that offers a supportive frame, and the engaging performances of Edwards and Flood keep this show aloft quite ably. Edwards as Paul is quiet, focused, rapt. Flood holds her own kind of calm with swirling emotions beneath.

The Counter is a play of isolation in small town upstate New York that could be small town anywhere in America, that raises ethical end of life question and is brave enough to allow quite a few dramatic ideas fade without resolution. For some this might be a frustration. For others like me, this feels like life: we live, we suffer a bit, we struggle to make sense, we leave chapters abruptly, we move on.

© Martha Wade Steketee (October 10, 2024)

Playwright | Meghan Kennedy
Director | David Cromer
Set Design | Walt Spangler
Costume Design | Sarah Laux
Lighting Design | Stacey Derosier
Sound | Christopher Darbassie