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...