Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust is the story of a man in need of compassion with no easy way to ask for it. With arresting theatricality, the play uses light humor to show the main character’s isolation from others while slowly clarifying the depth of what damaged him. In Vermont Stage‘s assured production, tragedy and comedy mesh in a portrait of a troubled man, guiding us to look instead of looking away.
Booth graduated from the University of Vermont and went on to attend the Juilliard School’s playwriting program. Primary Trust won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The writing is filled with funny observation devoted to a tender appraisal of the unusual and affecting character Kenneth. The conflicts are small, but the stakes are emotionally big.
The play’s structure is stylishly compact. Quirky details fill the text, so that a story told in 90 minutes is still saturated with emotional weight. In brief monologues that bookend action, Kenneth directly addresses the audience to share his thoughts. The play covers about two months of big changes in his previously routine life, enacted in many short scenes.
Wearing a bright plaid shirt buttoned up to the neck, Kenneth enters to introduce the play, himself and the small fictional town of Cranberry, N.Y. He’s nervous. He interrupts himself to start over. Actually, a small ding from an egg timer interrupts, a signal that we learn indicates a slight slippage of Kenneth’s awareness of time itself. Events repeat or elongate to include exaggerations that may or may not have actually happened. The jittery repetitions give us a chance to perceive as Kenneth does. It’s a jagged world, and memory doesn’t smooth out his experiences.
The anxious figure onstage keeps trying to share his story, an effort that draws the audience’s sympathy and concern. And our laughs, because Kenneth’s odd perspective is intriguing. He’s got a sad childhood, but he seems to have overcome losing his mother at age 10 and growing up in an orphanage.
Ever since, he’s sought a reclusive, repetitive life. He’s worked in the same used-book store for the same fatherly owner for 20 years, and he spends each evening at the same bar drinking happy-hour mai tais with the same best friend, Bert. Patterns help him cope, but they don’t help him make more friends. Only Bert can help Kenneth squelch his anxiety.
When the bookstore owner has to sell his shop, Kenneth’s life must change. That’s when he reveals that Bert is imaginary. He has invented the person he needs, and he needs him more than ever.
As solitary as Kenneth is, he is quite good with people, as a potential employer would like. He’s smart and skilled at surface interactions, which suits a job as a bank teller at Primary Trust. The bank manager takes a chance on him. The script contrasts the hollow language of customer service with Kenneth’s confessional narration to show how empty, and how full, words can be.
Director Jammie Patton uses space, sound and light to convey Kenneth’s perceptions. The set consists of almost life-size black-and-white photos of the streets of a small town. Desks and tables are black and white, as well, and flattened into two dimensions. These stylizations convey Kenneth’s sense of the world as facts without the living pulse of color or shape.
But he does see one place in full. Wally’s Tiki Bar is Kenneth’s haven, and its jauntily lighted bar, gaudy thatched roof, bright tablecloths and soothing yacht rock are all as realistic as can be. Here he can conjure Bert.
With a single major character and no intermission, Primary Trust places the demands of a one-man show on Delanté Keys, playing Kenneth. Keys glides lightly between withdrawal (into safety but also near-psychosis) and expansiveness (toward connections but also misunderstandings). He conveys unease with a stiffness that runs through every muscle, then softens into loose relief upon seeing Bert. Kenneth is comically unselfconscious. His words may take all the strength he has, but when he laughs, he draws happiness from a very deep well.
Two actors play multiple characters, another expression of Kenneth’s imprecise perceptions. Natalie Jacobs portrays the many different waiters at Wally’s. The staff may blur to Kenneth, but they’re distinct onstage, as Jacobs utters Wally’s welcome speech in accents warm or cool, Jamaican or mumbled, musical or toneless. One waitress, Corinna, connects with Kenneth and opens a little more of the world to him.
Mark Roberts plays two fatherly men taking an interest in Kenneth, plus one stuffy waiter taking no interest in anyone. Roberts fills these simple portraits with sharp details, such as letting a stiff drink startle him or puzzling a bit when an obviously troubled Kenneth is too distant to help.
Bert, the imaginary friend, is made beautifully real by Donathan Walters. His voice and manner exude the calm of a soothing waterfall. With a warm smile and a cap spun backward, Walters makes Bert the best of best friends, breaking into silly jokes or gently signaling to Kenneth how to respond to anxious moments. In a rapid montage of drinking scenes, Walters and Keys hilariously flash from emotion to emotion in a dizzy bit of revelry.
Vermont Stage’s fine production values begin with expressive costumes from Sarah Sophia Lidz. Jamien Forrest’s effective lighting marks almost every beat of the show, especially Kenneth’s memory variations, often rendered as big color soaking the sky above set designer Jeff Modereger’s black-and-white building façades.
The people around Kenneth aren’t deeply drawn, just as the streetscape is bare and contrived. It’s Kenneth’s decision to connect with them that brings them to life. The breakthrough in this story isn’t Kenneth’s sudden ability to master the world but our ability to see what prevented him from feeling safe. Hope rises, too, as the very vulnerable Kenneth starts to see the kindness around him, the kindness of people who are real and not imaginary.