Susannah Flood and Anthony Edwards Photo by Joan Marcus

Walt Spangler's set, like Kennedy's writing, is no-nonsense. The thrust stage reveals an unremarkable coffee shop in upstate New York ("way upstate," says the program) from the POV of behind the titular counter: dishes stacked, silverware in the drawer, overused coffee maker percolating. There, Katie (Susannah Flood) is serving Paul (Anthony Edwards) his cup of joe, a six-morning-a-week ritual punctuated by small talk and, increasingly, not-so-small. They're plain folk, and Sarah Laux's costumes are off-the-Walmart-rack perfect.

They're friends, yet there's a substantial amount of conversation about whether they are or not. Paul, a retired fireman, even proposes a friendship-building exercise: Let's tell each other a personal secret, and engage in personal advice, or what he calls "tough talk." Paul's secret is about, wait, that's a spoiler, and Katie's is about a prior kinda-sorta boyfriend whose voicemails she has saved, to revisit and analyze and speculate on whether she should follow up on them. Between conversations, each soliloquizes about the other, and we know the dialogue is internal because Stacey Derosier's diner-harsh lighting has suddenly switched to a spotlight, and Christopher Darbassie's natural-sounding sound design has gone all echoey.

But back to counter back-and-forth. Katie has a small life: a front porch and Netflix and an undemanding work routine. And she likes it that way, though she's not what you'd call joyful. Paul has progressed to a predictable post-retirement existence, movies and the local pub and coffee. He has led an uneventful life, he never married, and we can't easily tell whether he's content or not, but signs increasingly point to not. He's critical of Katie's choices–"this is your give-up life," he volunteers of her current situation–and then he asks a favor of her, a big spoiler, and at first it sounds outrageous. But as Katie and Paul converse–and David Cromer's direction has them barely moving, which feels right–we start to see where Paul's coming from.

Paul also reveals something about a third character, Peg, a mutual acquaintance whom we eventually meet (Amy Warren). It amounts to a cameo, but Warren sure does nail it. There's an episode between Peg and Katie of does-she-know, and does-she-know-that-she-knows-that-she-knows. These small towns! We don't learn a whole lot about wherever they are upstate, except the roads are icy and the local economy is probably in stasis, and everyone seems to know everyone. There's a hint of, maybe, a present-day Our Town, and as in Our Town, the quotidian chores and chitchat deepen into philosophies about why we live, why we do or don't take the chances offered to us, and what the consequences of those decisions are.

I'd like to know a little more about wherever we are geographically–Primary Trust territory, perhaps?–and Kennedy's reluctance to provide a firm resolution to Paul's or Katie's story feels a bit of a cheat. But The Counter grows on you. Edwards, who didn't seem entirely right to me in Prayer for the French Republic last season, has Paul's stubbornness, weariness, and lumbering body language down pat, and Flood unfurls Katie's character in an emotional strip tease, one characteristic at a time, until a final momentous revelation that ties all the previous elements in a neat bow. Are Paul and Katie losers? Tough call. Can we relate to their disappointments and unsureness? Absolutely.

The Counter is 75 minutes long; I wasn't certain how I felt about it for about the first half, then I liked it, and by curtain, after Paul's and Katie's gorgeously delivered final soliloquies, I loved it. Maybe it's the casualness of its truth-telling, the slow drip of its life lessons, the unexpected laughs arising from sad situations. But I'll tell you this: On the way out, every conversation I overheard was about the play, not where are we going to have dinner or what are we watching tonight. How often does that happen?