What’s In a Name? Surface and Substance In The Counter and Dirty Laundry

The ostensible realism of a play like Meghan Kennedy’s The Counter can be deceiving — not because fire is eventually going to rain from the sky or a unicorn enter stage right, but because deeply familiar people and places can lull us into reading only the surfaces of things. This is a play about two people who meet every day from opposite sides of the counter at a scuzzy upstate cafe — with its dusty slatted blinds, old Bunn Automatic, and fading generic decal in the corner of one window warning of cameras on the premises, which may or may not ever have been true. So far, so straightforward. But the stage loves a double-meaning, and it loves a frantic action, and underneath its sedentary noun, Kennedy’s title contains both. We’re not really here for a play about the place where coffee and pie get served, but for a story about a proposition and its opposition. “To give a return blow while receiving or parrying a blow from one’s opponent,” runs one definition for the play’s name in the Online Etymological Dictionary. Paul (Anthony Edwards), the customer who arrives at the diner every day at first light, might phrase it more succinctly: “Tough talk.”

That’s what Paul wants — someone to share secrets with, who’ll get into the real, gnarly questions and call bullshit when they smell it. “Nothing’s happening here,” he says to the cafe’s server, Katie (Susannah Flood), early on over his daily cup of coffee. “But it’s still the best part of my day. So. What if we decide to become friends. Real friends.” Grizzled and blunt, Paul has the air of a guy who’s done beating around bushes. He’s old enough to be Katie’s father, but due to both Kennedy and Edwards’s sensitivity, there’s nothing creepy about his suggestion. If anything, its frankness carries a note of strange sorrow: Why is it so hard for adults to make friends? What are we so afraid of?

Under David Cromer’s gentle and meticulous direction, Edwards and Flood build out the emotional contours of this unlikely pair of comrade-combatants moment by moment and scene by scene, taking just seventy short minutes to ping us straight in the heart. (Amy Warren is equally affecting in her secondary yet vital role as a local doctor who also stops by the diner and who’s got a history with Paul.) Cromer has a singular gift for poignancy without sentimentality. His worlds never become sloppy with feeling, but oh, how they ache. It’s great fuel for actors: Feel ten, show seven goes the old Noh theater proverb. As Katie and Paul, Flood and Edwards both revel in the invigorating challenge of wearing a heavy coat — not literally (though sometimes that’s also true; it’s upstate New York in the chilly months, after all), but in terms of how their characters protect and present themselves. Kennedy’s telling the story of two wounded, armored souls slowly unbuckling before each other and with each other’s help. It’s a game of spiritual strip poker, with nothing carnal about its intimacy, and the stakes, it turns out, are life or death.

“I want you to poison me,” says Paul, hardly a few days after Katie has tentatively agreed to be his “real friend.” (That proposal, it turns out, was only the teaser.) He is, as always, matter-of-fact about it. “I have this poison. It’s plant based. And one morning … sometime in the next month or two or three, I want you to put it in my coffee.” As she stammers and protests, he insists: He’s not depressed. He’s not suicidal. He’s just done: “You know when you read a book and it’s a good book, but you get to page 150 and you just, you get the point, and you just put it down?” Kennedy is incisive and darkly funny without ever being glib. Paul takes his decision seriously, and so does she. Meanwhile, Katie is horrified but also hooked — Flood expertly plays the low-key, crooked humor as Katie, the next morning, babbles on to Paul about “an incredible podcast” she’s found after “Googling what to do in this situation.”

The pair are in it now. But Paul’s not the only one who wants something. Katie has also made a request, and while hers might seem innocuous in comparison, there’s always something more under the coat. “I’ve got 27 voicemails saved on my phone …” she’s told Paul. “They’re all from this one person … Could you please listen to the voicemails with me one more time? And then I’ll delete them.” Proposal, counter-proposal; death, life. In different ways, both Paul and Katie are retreating — not really from mundanity but from pain. While Paul is considering a literal and final exit, Katie has also chosen withdrawal, a kind of hibernation. “This is your give-up life!” Paul exclaims when she reveals what led her to flee “the city,” move seven hours upstate, and take a job in a podunk diner. Yes, it has to do with voicemail-guy — recorded, in a lovely little cameo, by Will Brill — but again, there’s more. There’s always more.

The subtle beauty of The Counter lies in watching these two burrowing creatures develop the kind of bond that means, when one has the impulse to dig deeper, the other now has hold of a rope — little by little, through curiosity and care for someone else, they’re pulling each other back up towards the light. As Flood and Edwards played their delicate, urgent tug-of-war, I found myself thinking of another show, also wonderfully light in touch, by the brilliant storyteller Daniel Kitson: In The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church (which you can watch here for $5, and you should), Kitson tells the story of a man who has every intention of ending his own life, right after he sets his affairs in order. We hear selections from the 30,659 letters Kitson claims to have found from the eponymous Church — evidence of a death continually postponed by little intrusions of life. Proposal, counter-proposal. The night is cold and restless, but the morning promises coffee and, more bracing still, tough conversation.

In Dirty Laundry, the split implication of Mathilde Dratwa’s title falls flatter because we don’t have to look twice for it. Clearly we’re not taking our seats for a play about smelly gym shorts, but about emotional baggage — or, more accurately, for a play where both sides of that well-worn idiom will be held up in conspicuous juxtaposition. To wit: A woman (Lakisha May) who’s had a falling-out with her father (Richard Masur) after the death of her mother advises him testily over the phone about how to use his own washing machine (“She did your laundry for 45 years and you never even …” she trails off in frustration). I’m always a bit leery of this particular brand of wordplay in the name of a show. It’s too easy. It lets us start out too comfortably: Ha. I get it.

There is, however, more charm to Dirty Laundry than its title might imply. It clunks a bit as it spins, but it’s also got an endearing wryness to it, along with a pair of finely calibrated performances if not at its center then right outside of it. These belong to Masur and Constance Shulman, playing characters the script refers to as “My Father” and “Another Woman.” (May’s character is called “Me.” It feels like a safe bet that Dratwa is dipping pretty heavily into autobiography.) They are, in a sweet, shambling way, both the play’s villains and its heart. Villains because the early, wrenching revelation for Me — which she stumbles across while her mother is dying from stomach cancer, quick and brutally described — is that her 70-year-old father has been having an affair — and not just a fling but a cute, stable, six-year-long relationship with Another Woman, a former nurse at the hospital where he’s long been a doctor. Heart because, well, we can’t help but grow quite fond of them.

Masur finds real softness in a man who could come across as tritely unsympathetic — the nephrologist who somehow doesn’t know not to put a wool blazer in the wash. Instead, his helplessness manifests in a constantly furrowed brow and series of gestures that feel too small for his square, shaggy body, like those of a lost bear. There’s a tender bewilderment about him that illuminates, more than his housework-free existence, the extent of his grief. Though his daughter is initially horrified to learn that he was “still having sex” with her mother during the affair, Dratwa sketches her affront from a distance — Me is sympathetic, of course, but is she, in her hurt and fury, right? From one perspective, and without absolving anyone, wasn’t there more love amongst this odd-numbered tangle of senior citizens rather than less?

Shulman, meanwhile, with her bird bones and unmistakable Tennessee twang (forever imprinted on my generation through Patti Mayonnaise), provides the perfect counterpoint for Masur; she’s crisp where he’s fuzzy and practical and pointed where he has a tendency to wander. Neither, however, is unversed when it comes to failing bodies. Some of Dirty Laundry’s strongest stuff involves the shared lack of sentimentality with which these lovers, both medical professionals, approach the awkward (“Have a nice colonoscopy!” she shouts to him from the driver’s seat) as well as the unspeakable: “This is it,” says Me’s father with deceptive calm, after a long while of sitting with his daughter and listening to his wife’s ragged breaths. “Active dying. Notice her lips turning blue. Her extremities …” Does the technicality make it more or less terrible? Or are both things — like this aging doctor’s love for his wife and for his lover — just painfully, simultaneously true?

In a somewhat sparer production, Dirty Laundry might have more room to breathe, shaping itself more fully around its performers, who really don’t need much help to tell Dratwa’s story. She’s made sure of that by surrounding Me, My Father, and Another Woman with a three-person Chorus (Mary Bacon, Sasha Diamond, and Amy Jo Jackson). They traverse the fourth wall with ease, offering humor, perspective, and a certain degree of omniscience — it’s not total, but it is the wider angle of hindsight. While they sometimes seem to represent aspects of Me (Diamond, for instance, often gives voice to the character’s most impulsive, wounded, self-centered thoughts), they’re also a set of muses. They appeal to our imaginary forces, and with the help of their conjuring, Dirty Laundry could unfold on an empty stage. But director Rebecca Martinez and scenic designer Raul Abrego have cluttered things up a bit. Their rendering of the playing space is an odd mish-mash of the real (a kitchen table, a washing machine), the abstract (hovering frames and color blocks), and the unnecessarily symbolic — a massive diagram of the kidneys hangs on the wall, which is papered in a pattern that resembles the branching bronchioles of the lungs. When May’s grieving daughter gives a speech at her mother’s funeral, the paper she reads from has the same feathery graphic on it. The gestures accumulate without adding up. It’s design for design’s sake, and it muddies our focus on the very thing that poor Me struggles and suffers over throughout her journey with her father — that is, on what actually matters.

The Counter is at Roundabout Theatre Company through November 17.

Dirty Laundry is at WP Theater through October 20.