MadLab’s ‘culture clash’ reveals human frailties

“Counter/Top” packs down-home humor and Red State/Blue State conflicts into just more than an hour of melodramatic fun.

MadLab Theatre’s lively play, which opened Friday at its Downtown space, rarely transcends the sitcom formula and small-town stereotypes of the short play by Kirin McCrory.

Still, director Meg Mateer helps the six-member cast knit the quirky characterizations and punchy dialogue into a convincing semblance of flawed humanity.

In the brisk one-act, two generations and classes collide: Izzie (Cat McAlpine) and Khent (Chad Anderson), a married pair of upscale college professors who drop by for lunch at a folksy diner on their way from Virginia to Florida; and Liza (Kayla Theis) and Gunner

(Dustin Schwab), a volatile young couple of troublemakers.

Theis shines in the most intriguing role. Her Liza, seemingly a teenage airhead at the start of the play, proves to be a shrewd judge of character with a barbed wit.

In probing the professors to uncover hypocrisies, Theis sparks laughs and, later, rueful thoughts about how people hide uncomfortable truths.

Anderson nimbly navigates his two-faced role to reveal a darker side to Khent’s personality and history.

Dustin Schwab delightfully fulfills, then transcends, stereotypes as Gunner, Liza’s impulsive boyfriend. Beneath Gunner’s stupidity, Schwab finds a daffy sweetness.

Catherine Cryan (as Miss Betty, the sharp-tongued diner proprietor) and Ben Tucker (as Brooks, a stolid, largely incoherent diner regular) also generate a few laughs. But, as the Thursday preview reinforced, such underwritten characters are as predictable as reruns of old sitcoms.

The diner set, very detailed by MadLab standards, grounds the story in greasy-spoon realism.

“Counter/Top” is suggested for mature audiences because of frequent profanity. Only a little is needed, though, to underline the differences in education and culture between diner regulars and visitors.