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What’s In a Name? Surface and Substance In The Counter and Dirty Laundry
Meghan Kennedy goes deep in a diner, and Mathilde Dratwa gets personal with grief.
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 decal in the corner of one window warning of cameras on the premises, which may or may not ever have been true. Some of Dirty Laundry ’s strongest stuff involves the shared lack of sentimentality with which these lovers, both medical professionals, approach the awkward (“Have a nice colonoscopy!” she shouts to him from the driver’s seat) as well as the unspeakable: “This is it,” says Me’s father with deceptive calm, after a long while of sitting with his daughter and listening to his wife’s ragged breaths. Their rendering of the playing space is an odd mish-mash of the real (a kitchen table, a washing machine), the abstract (hovering frames and color blocks), and the unnecessarily symbolic — a massive diagram of the kidneys hangs on the wall, which is papered in a pattern that resembles the branching bronchioles of the lungs.
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