Early every morning, Paul buys a cup of coffee and jokes around with Katie, the waitress in the otherwise empty local diner in the kind of small town in Upstate New York where the townsfolk talk about the ice on the roads and little else.  Then one morning, Paul says to Katie: “What if we decide to become friends. Real friends. Like we tell each other secrets.”

Even before the characters reveal their secrets in “The Counter,” a new play by Meghan Kennedy directed by David Cromer that’s opening tonight at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theater, we’re primed to expect a familiar story of two sad and lonely people who find hope in each other.  How this happens in “The Counter” is not entirely predictable, but neither is it terribly convincing.

Anthony Edwards plays Paul, who grew up in this town, while Susannah Flood plays Katie, who moved here two years ago.  When we first meet them, the characters are engaged in a light banter that feels flirtatious, made all the more inviting because of the portrayal by these two appealing actors. Although it’s clear their interaction has been limited to these breakfasts at the diner, Paul tells Katie he feels he knows the “real you” based on five observations he’s made about her, which he then shares with her (“you’ve never once said thank you to a compliment. You deflect every time. Which makes me feel a kinship to you.”) Katie has her own list of five about Paul, less complimentary and more poetic, which, the production makes clear, she is sharing with the audience, not with Paul. (“You think: it’s okay, this life. The coffee will race the darkness down your throat and settle the fear.”)

It’s after their agreement to become real friends and share secrets that we learn of their despair – deep and quirky, respectively. Some theatergoers might see what I’m about to tell you as spoilers, but these two revelations are the engine that drives the plot, such as it is. And these are just the initial secrets that the playwright parcels out. 

So, first the quirky: Katie asks Paul to listen to 27 voicemail messages on her answering machine, all from a man in the place that she left two years ago; he was in large part the reason why she left, because he didn’t seem as interested in her as she was in him. She’s never listened to them and wants finally, with Paul’s help, to delete them.

Paul agrees to listen, but asks for a favor in return – that she spike his coffee with a lethal poison he’ll supply to her.

Katie is understandably shocked, and then baffled: “Why not just poison yourself?”

“I think you’re missing the point,” Paul replies. “I don’t want to know when it’s coming. The biggest surprise of my life will be the only surprise of my life.” 

It would be reasonable to expect “The Counter” thus to wind up an absurdist comedy. There are certainly touches of humor. But much of the rest of the play delves further into Paul’s and Katie’s sorrows, even awkwardly introducing a third actor to elucidate; Amy Warren has a somewhat thankless cameo as the doctor in the town, and Paul’s old flame.

Kennedy seems to be attempting something poignant and hopeful, close in tone to Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” an unlikely connection between two regular people; or perhaps even Samuel D. Hunter’s “A Case for the Existence of God,” which explores the extraordinary that exists within the sadness of the ordinary, the cosmic that can be revealed in the everyday. The production even has the right director to effect such a tone: Cromer helmed Hunter’s play Off-Broadway, and achieved something similar in the memorable 2009 Off Broadway production of “Our Town.” 

But these are simply better plays. Too much of what the characters say and do in “The Counter” feels imposed by the playwright. Paul’s line proposing friendship (“….Like we tell each other secrets”) sounds to me more like something a middle schooler might say, rather than a middle aged loner. Even the set feels like a metaphor for what’s off: We most often see the characters in side view, not fully before us.

“The Counter” is not intended as a downer of a play; just the opposite. As the playwright pushes her characters towards hope, “The Counter” might serve  as a counter for some in the audience to current-day/everyday doldrums. Since, as Buddha said, “hope lives in those who believe in it,” I wish I could have found “The Counter” more believable.

The Counter
Roundabout’s  Laura Pels Theater through November 17
Running time: About 75 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $77 – $164
Written by Meghan Kennedy
Directed by David Cromer
Sets by Walt Spangler, costumes by Sarah Laux, lights by Stacey Derosier, and sound by Christopher Darbassie 
Cast: Anthony Edwards, Susannah Flood, Amy Warren