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    In ‘The Counter,’ With Anthony Edwards, a Cup of Joe and a Side of Secrets

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    A diner patron asks a waitress for an extraordinary side dish in Meghan Kennedy’s sweet but shaggy new play.With their twirly stools, chipped mugs and napkin contraptions, old-fashioned diners are apparently dying out. But not onstage, where they solve a lot of playwriting problems.Getting strangers to talk to each other? Easy: Waitress, meet customer. Motivating random pop-ins and exits? Jingle the door and pay the bill. Signal “America” without having to say it? The Bunn-O-Matic might as well be a flag.All of those are ingredients in “The Counter,” a sweet but shaggy dramedy by Meghan Kennedy that opened Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The waitress is Katie (Susannah Flood): a big-city exile returning to her small-town home for reasons that emerge over the play’s 75 minutes. Her first customer, most days, is Paul (Anthony Edwards): a retired firefighter slumping onto his favorite stool for coffee and a lifeline of conversation.Kennedy’s dialogue is piquant and suggestive but mechanically avoidant. Needing to hold back the play’s big events, she lets her characters spend most of its first third dropping bread crumbs of information and noodling amusingly around the edges of not much. Paul has trouble sleeping and is a cinephile. Katie prefers Netflix. Both, it’s clear, if only by the impenetrable fog on the windows, are lost and lonely, in a way we are meant to understand as American.The banality of all that is undercut, in David Cromer’s typically thoughtful staging, by hints that the story will soon be heading sideways. That’s literally true of Walt Spangler’s set, which orients the title character — the counter — perpendicular to the audience, so we see the divide between Katie and Paul at all times. At some point, each also gets a private soliloquy, with lighting (by Stacey Derosier) and sound (by Christopher Darbassie) altered to indicate interiority.But these breaks in the production’s otherwise closely observed naturalism — including hoodies, plaids and puffers by Sarah Laux — come off as passing tics, especially in comparison to the plot’s wackadoodle bombshell, which distorts the rest of the play.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Daniel Dae Kim as a Playwright Unmasked in ‘Yellow Face’

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      David Henry Hwang’s 2007 play, now in a fine Broadway revival, is a pointed critique of identity, masquerading as a mockumentary.To write yourself into your own play is to put on a very curious mask. If it’s flattering, is it honest? If it’s honest, why bother?Those questions, both as artistic choices and as problems of social identity, are powerfully and hilariously engaged in the revival of David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” that opened on Tuesday at the Todd Haimes Theater. The answers are deliberately equivocal. On one hand, this Roundabout production, directed (as was the 2007 original) by Leigh Silverman, stars the exceedingly likable and handsome Daniel Dae Kim as Hwang’s stand-in, called DHH. On the other, this DHH is a worm.So too is the sinuous story, which requires a ton of exposition to get on its way. DHH, exactly like Hwang, won a 1988 Tony Award for his Broadway debut, “M. Butterfly.” His 1993 follow-up, “Face Value,” won only notoriety. Closing before its official New York opening, it earned the nickname “M. Turkey.”From left, Kevin Del Aguila, Kim, Shannon Tyo and Marinda Anderson. The supporting cast, mismatched to roles without regard to gender or race, are all wonderfully inventive, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Face Value” was Hwang’s theatrical response to the “Miss Saigon” controversy, in which the producer Cameron Mackintosh, importing that megamusical from London in 1991, sought to import its star, Jonathan Pryce, as well. But because Pryce is white, and his character is Eurasian, protests against the casting ensued. Nevertheless, the show went on — and on and on — with Mackintosh dismissing the dispute as “a storm in an Oriental teacup.”Hence “Face Value”: a broad farce, set in part at the “Imperialist Theater,” about the casting of a white actor in the title role of a musical called “The Real Fu Manchu.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In a Nostalgic Revival, ‘Home’ Is Where the Heart Was

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      Samm-Art Williams’s 1979 play about the uprooting of a Black farmer returns to Broadway for the first time.To say that Samm-Art Williams’s 1979 play “Home” is old-fashioned is to say that “The Odyssey” and “The Wizard of Oz” are too: They are all tear-jerking stories about lost souls working their way back to the proverbial place where the heart is. But another way to see them is as keen records of how we thought, at particular points in time, about our place in the universe. Is that ever old-fashioned?For “Home,” which opened on Wednesday at the Todd Haimes Theater, the particular point in time is the tail end of the Great Migration, bringing millions of Black Americans to the North from the South in an attempt to escape racism and poverty. Among them is the play’s protagonist, Cephus Miles, a North Carolina farmer who winds up in a big city a lot like New York after spending five years in prison. His crime: taking too seriously the biblical commandment to love thy neighbor and the injunction not to kill. He refused to serve in Vietnam.Though the outline of the story might seem to warrant a furious response, like that of many antiwar and antiracist works of the ’70s, “Home” follows a different line, its honeyed cadences glazing its anger with affection. That’s apt because Williams is ultimately less interested in the embitterments of the world than in the ability, indeed the necessity, of masking the bad taste of unfairness with love.And Cephus (Tory Kittles) is certainly not angry at the South. His memories of hard work, tall tales and odd characters in segregated, fictional Cross Roads — likely based on Williams’s Burgaw, N.C. — are surprisingly upbeat. The poverty, being general, is bearable. (And funny: If a possum falls into the moonshine still, so be it.) The racism shows up mostly as marginalia, implied rather than prosecuted. Black boys shoot dice in the white section of the cemetery, Cephus tells us, because “that’s where the nice cement vaults were.” The Black section’s graves provide no level surface.The nostalgic style, unfashionable for decades, may be why “Home” has not until now been revived on Broadway, despite its successful and much-praised premiere. Kenny Leon’s production for the Roundabout Theater Company — a result of the company’s Refocus Project, designed “to elevate and restore marginalized plays to the American canon” — is thus especially welcome, if perhaps overly faithful to the original vision. With golden light (by Allen Lee Hughes) and a set consisting mostly of a rocking chair and a tobacco field that make the sharecropping life look strangely inviting (scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado), it steers right into instead of away from sentimentality, giving us the full flavor of the writing at the cost of courting hokum.The play is mostly a monologue for Kittles’s character, while Ayers and Inge provide quick-take sketches of preachers, loose women, drunks and aunties.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Doubt,’ What He Knows, She Knows, God Knows

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      Liev Schreiber and Amy Ryan star in a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s moral head spinner about pride, the priesthood and presumptions of pedophilia.Here are a few things Sister Aloysius cannot abide: ballpoint pens, “Frosty the Snowman,” long fingernails like Father Flynn’s, Father Flynn himself.She is what you’d call a forbidding nun, a Sister of Charity without much of it. (Her name means something like “warrior.”) The principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, she defines a good teacher as one who is a discomfort to her students, a “fierce moral guardian,” not a friend.“If you are vigilant,” she tells young Sister James, “they will not need to be.”But Father Flynn, following the spirit of the recent Second Vatican Council, and presumably his own inclinations, does not lead with fear. In ministering to his mostly Italian and Irish congregation, he seeks to give the church “a more familiar face.” His sermons are warm, told with jokes and accents. He coaches the boys’ basketball team. Add to Sister Aloysius’s catalog of unholy tendencies his suggestion that they occasionally take the students for ice cream.Even if nothing else set these two forces in opposition, there would be enough here for a fine play about varieties of faith. But John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt: A Parable,” first seen on Broadway in 2005, is much more than that. It is a sturdy melodrama, an infallible crowd-pleaser, a detective yarn, a character study and an inquest into the unknowable.It is also, in the handsome revival that opened on Thursday at the Todd Haimes Theater, something I hadn’t really noticed before: a battle of the sexes. For in the church of that day, as perhaps in our own, mutual distrust often arose between the men who had all the power and the women who saw how they used it.Why, after all, should Aloysius (Amy Ryan) already dislike the popular Flynn (Liev Schreiber) when the action begins? Why should she suspect that behind his “more familiar face” lies overfamiliarity? Is it his ballpoint pen? Those detestable fingernails?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Jonah,’ Starring Gabby Beans, Trust Nothing, and No One

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      Gabby Beans shines as a time-hopping protagonist tracing her trauma in Rachel Bonds’s slip-slidey new Off Broadway play.Roundabout Theater Company’s website tells you right up front that the title character of “Jonah,” Rachel Bonds’s slip-slidey, stunning new play, “is not all he seems.” And if you click on the link to the production’s content advisory, self-harm, suicide and physical abuse are among the topics it flags.All of that can leave a theatergoer in a state of wariness — which, it turns out, is a great way to watch this play: trusting nothing, unsure where reality lies, guard firmly raised against any kind of charm. Mind you, “Jonah” will charm you anyway, and make you laugh. So will Jonah, the adorable day student (or is he?) whom Ana, our teenage heroine, meets at her boarding school (or does she?). Who and what is illusory here?The notes I took during the show are filled with skepticism like that about my own perceptions, even as Danya Taymor’s all-around excellent production, which opened Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, lured me right in.The flirty, funny banter between the self-assured Ana (Gabby Beans, in a top-of-her-game performance) and the more broken-winged Jonah (a disarming Hagan Oliveras) is utterly adolescent, as is the way they occupy their bodies. They still have the flop-on-the-floor looseness of little kids, but it’s mixed with cheeky daring (mostly hers) and mortified caution (mostly his), because hormones and desire have entered the picture.“I don’t want to be weird,” Jonah says in Ana’s dorm room, when things between them edge toward intimacy, “and I just want you to feel OK and safe and my whole body is basically an alien colony, I have been colonized by sex aliens and I’m sorry.”With a flash of white light and a zapping sound, the comforting comedy of that milieu vanishes, as does Jonah. Ana is now in her bedroom at home, where a guy named Danny (Samuel H. Levine), who appears to be her brother, gives off a profoundly creepy vibe. (The set is by Wilson Chin, lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and sound by Kate Marvin.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More