A Small Tale, and Little Ambition, In THE COUNTER — Review

Playwright Meghan Kennedy’s last outing with Roundabout Theatre Company was her ambitious 1960s family saga Napoli, Brooklyn, staged at the Laura Pels in 2018 with a grand set, 8-person cast and one startling coup de théâtre—a recreation of the Park Slope plane crash of 1960, which startlingly blew most of that set to pieces. 

Kennedy’s new play The Counter, opening tonight at the same theater, boasts a single set and just three characters. Perhaps a sign of our frugal times. Many of Roundabout’s recent off-Broadway stagings have felt scaled-down, in budget if not necessarily ambition. The days of If I Forget’s rotating house or decades-spanning period piece Love, Love, Love seem long-past. 

Modest stagings do not, of course, equal modest ambitions. Pulitzer Prize winner and Pels occupant Primary Trust tackled huge questions of isolation and fraying social fabrics through a quiet, humble tale. The Counter is a letdown ultimately not due to its scale, but rather Kennedy’s disappointing lack of thematic ambition. 

The setting is a small, unnamed town somewhere in upstate New York (“way upstate,” per the script). Retired fireman Paul (Anthony Edwards) is an early-morning regular at a little diner tended by waitress Katie (Susannah Flood). Each day, the two catch-up amiably as the sun peaks its way out. (The dingy set is by Walt Spangler; ravishing lighting by Stacey Derosier brings out surprising moments of beauty.) 

Paul and Katie are both warm but reserved, and the pair’s bond grows naturally in the play’s early scenes. Edwards and Flood, both terrific, find a gentle intimacy under David Cromer’s typically fine-tuned direction. The dynamic hits a careful balance, kindly yet never romantic. Katie never seems to be playing up that kindliness for her customer’s benefit—rather, her kinship with Paul feels genuine. 

And yet, Paul does need something from Katie. It would be an unfair spoiler to reveal precisely what Paul is after. Suffice to say that, once his need has been spoken aloud, the play quickly starts to deflate. The twist is neither interesting nor original, and while Kennedy does wring some pleasingly dark humor out of Paul’s request, she only fleetingly utilizes it to up the dramatic tension. 

In all fairness, Kennedy is clearly less interested in whether Katie will honor Paul’s request than she is in the larger questions his appeal brings up. 

“You can’t gather grief - it keeps changing,” Paul tells Katie, explaining his profound dissatisfaction. “I am tired of walking through the grocery store and knowing that. I am tired of watching a movie and knowing that. I’m tired of knowing.” 

Philosophically, there are intriguing ideas at play. Paul is sick of the false narratives we embrace to get through life, the fictions we indulge to make sense out of unending and senseless pain. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, etc.. But for Paul, these stories no longer hold any power, and he can’t keep faking it. 

As quickly as Kennedy had opened up these larger questions, though, the play seems to back away from them. Katie’s problems are revealed as specific, singular: she ran away from her actual life, and needs to be rescued and brought back to reality. And Paul’s unhappiness is eventually boiled down to a need for “surprises,” any kind of unexpected event. It’s a strange turn. After pondering the impossibility of answers in a vast confusion, Kennedy suddenly decides that, for this wayward pair, the answers are actually quite simple. 

Perhaps the dissonance is deliberate. Should we assume that Paul and Katie, fearing the possibility of a meaningless world, are themselves retreating back to a more comforting story? It doesn’t play that way in Cromer’s staging, which moves abruptly into a more upbeat mood. The tonal shift feels unearned and unsatisfying.

Most frustratingly, this late turn makes a very modest story feel, by its end, altogether unimportant. A small set and, sad to say, small ambitions. 

‍The Counter is now in performance through November 17, 2024. For tickets and more information, visit here.