Theatre in Review: The Counter (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)

	Susannah Flood, Anthony Edwards. Photo: Joan Marcus

You can't say The Counter isn't efficient; like a crack short-order cook, it wastes no time in serving up its thoroughly unbelievable premise. It features Paul, a retired fireman and, inevitably, the first customer each morning in an Upstate New York diner, who has a nice rapport with Katie, the morning-shift waitress. She pours coffee spiked with light, bright, and cheerfully banal conversation, offering them a reliable start to each day. (His insomnia, for example, is a perpetually fruitful subject, as his status as "everyone's favorite customer" and the contents of her lunch.) Then, seemingly out of the blue, Paul makes a proposition: It's time, he says, they get closer and trade a few confidences. This is not a romantic proposition; even so, it leaves Katie feeling strangely uneasy. "Would you consider me your friend as it is?" Paul asks. "I...well... I'd consider you a friendly customer," Katie temporizes. She will soon wish she had stuck to pouring cups of joe and making small talk.

As an opening gambit, Paul reveals that he is an alcoholic -- a dry one, who got himself off the bottle without the aid of AA. This is a fairly standard admission in a play about loners like him and Katie, but things get more baroque. Upping the ante, Katie reveals the collapse, two years earlier, of a budding romance -- an event that had life-altering effects. After weeks of getting no action from the guy in question, she took the initiative, giving him what was, she admits, a pretty good kiss. "Then," she recalls, "He said he had put me on a pedestal, he had put me on the highest shelf where no one, not even he, could ruin me. And couldn't we just go on the way it was?"

A setback, to be sure -- and, one would think, a signal to start shopping around for a new beau -- but, amazingly, it caused Katie to flee New York City, starting over in a small town far from everything and everyone she knew. (As it happens, there's much more to it, but let that pass for now.) Since then, her almost-lover has left 27 messages on her smartphone, filling her voicemail and making her unreachable to her friends. She proposes that she and Paul go through them together.

If Katie's story sounds not totally credible - like something a playwright might make up -- Paul tops her with a simple request: Handing her a bottle of poison, he tells her he is done with living and, wanting to exit this world on his terms, asks to slip some into his coffee anytime in the few months, the time to be chosen by her. "I would like the last event of my life, maybe the event of my life, to be a surprise," he says. "And I'd like it to be in your company."

Unsurprisingly, Katie -- who, by this point, must be questioning her choice of male friends -- finds this proposition less than appealing. Not that she tries to intervene in any meaningful way, like calling in a mental health professional to deal with what pretty obviously seems to be a cry for help. As we learn, Paul's life has been one of manifold burdens, including nursing his MS-plagued mother to the end and watching his brother die, expensively, of early-onset dementia. There's also his aborted affair with a married local doctor. But, unless you are willing to embrace this setup's brazen falsity, you won't feel very engaged at The Counter. Among other things, you'll have to excuse Paul's monumental selfishness, offloading his suicide plan on Katie, putting her into possible legal jeopardy, and exposing her to extreme emotional upset.

Once the poison is unveiled, The Counter struggles to fill out its brief, seventy-five-minute running time with the inevitable consequences. Among other things, the playwright, Meghan Kennedy, introduces Peg, the doctor who is Paul's true love, to fill in crucial information about his tragedy-plagued past. (Happiness, she notes, is "not really in his wheelhouse. Kind, stubborn...funny even. But happy? Meh.") This would be the ideal time for Katie to spill the beans about Paul's suicidal ideations, but that would spoil the play. Instead, Katie makes like Scheherazade, using those voicemails to keep Paul interested in living.

The director, David Cromer, works so effectively with his cast that, particularly, in the later scenes, The Counter sometimes seems less artificial than it is. Looking thoroughly ragged in denim and flannel, his facial hair as out of control as the fires he used to put out, Anthony Edwards gives Paul a rough, plain-spoken honesty that belies his self-obsessed behavior. He also goes a long way toward convincing us Paul is paralyzed with emotional pain; his silent reaction in the play's final moments is a masterful piece of acting. Edwards enjoys a fine rapport with Susannah Flood, first seen slouching on the counter, expecting another uneventful day, then growing increasingly flustered over the responsibility dumped on her. And when she reveals the real reason for leaving the city -- a medical issue that Kennedy describes in hair-raising detail -- the artificial construction of The Counter suddenly feels shot through with real, agonizing pain. Cromer also supplies some quietly revelatory moments, for example, when Peg (an incisive cameo by Amy Warren) impulsively gives Paul a silent half-embrace that calls up a world of regret.

Cromer has assembled the right design team for this project. Walt Spangler's angled, photorealistic diner set, showing the view behind the counter, from Katie's point of view, is detail-perfect. Stacey Derosier's lighting completes the effect, especially those lovely bursts of sunshine. Sarah Laux's costumes are on-target; everything Paul wears points to someone who has given up. Christopher Darbassie's sound design is typically solid. In every department, Roundabout has given this slender effort the Cadillac treatment. But The Counter -- which compares unfavorably with Primary Trust, another tale of small-town loners recently staged in this theatre -- veers uncontrollably between real heartbreak and a kind of Hallmark movie treatment, never finding a comfortable landing position. At this diner, what they're serving, I'm not buying. --David Barbour