The bitter sweets
A review of "Primary Trust" with a quote stolen from "Kimberly Akimbo."
It’s nearly impossible to not think of Our Town when watching Primary Trust. The play begins with Kenneth (William Jackson Harper) describing his town to the audience—he’s not a Stage Manager, but his direct address continues throughout. Like Grover’s Corners, Cranberry, New York is not a real place. (There’s a Cranberry Lake, though it’s considerably farther from Rochester than the community described in the play.)
The more you see of Primary Trust, the less it feels like Our Town, even though there are certainly very broad thematic links—of love, of loss, of what we carry with us—between them. But realistically, the two works are going to remain tethered in my mind because they’re both plays with monologues in the final scene that I’m almost certainly going to think about and start getting emotional in response to at inopportune times.
Eboni Booth’s new play has a tighter focus than Thornton Wilder’s: Kenneth is a man whose world is even smaller than the town he’s spent his whole life in. At 38, he’s only ever worked one job, is perpetually unattached, and has one friend he does the same thing with every night. That repeated activity—drinking two-for-one mai tais at a local tiki bar—takes on a bleaker tone when Kenneth reveals that Bert (Eric Berryman) is imaginary. In a lesser play, this might have been saved as a twist, but Kenneth is not an unreliable narrator. He is, to a certain extent, clear-headed about how confined his life is and his limitations, even if he doesn’t quite have the tools to imagine what it might look like to broaden his world, or even to want that.
Harper is an extraordinarily gifted performer. The character is sympathetic on the page, but the actor helps imbue Kenneth with so much pathos that it’s sometimes a little hard to watch. Primary Trust doesn’t revel in misery, and ultimately it’s a play that is focused on progress. At the same time, it’s grounded in the reality of change—and that “one step forward, two steps back” movement is heartbreaking when you care as much about Kenneth as we do almost from the start. It’s largely a credit to Harper that he’s able to win you over so quickly, and Booth does an exceptional job of giving him just enough obstacles (both internal and external) as he stumbles toward his future.
There was actually a moment an hour in that I had the thought, “This is too sad.” That seems like maybe an immature response—and also an out-of-character one for someone who loves to get weepy. But Primary Trust does wash over you in a way that can be overwhelming. It gets under your skin and surprises you with how deeply it’s embedded. And even as that “too sad” feeling faded, there was a lingering melancholy that stuck with me after the play was over.
The play could give Kenneth an easy out with a happy ending that would be as relieving as it was inauthentic. Instead, we get something that feels truer to life: The sadness doesn’t disappear, it just shares space with hope. I found myself thinking of a phrase that’s been rolling around in my head since I first saw Kimberly Akimbo: “the bitter sweets.”
I try not to recommend shows based solely on how much they made me cry—certainly there are plenty that I enjoyed simply because they were a good time! But I see a lot of theater, and I often find myself responding with a shrug, which is actually worse than when a play is actively bad. (Bad plays at least make you feel something!) With that in mind, I can’t help but celebrate the work that provokes the most powerful emotional response.
Primary Trust knocked me out. I haven’t really been able to stop thinking about it since. And I want everyone else to have that experience—not in a sadistic way, but because it’s essential to see what theater can do when it’s firing on all cylinders. And also because sometimes it’s nice to let beautiful work fuck you up and leave you reeling.
Primary Trust runs through July 2 at the Laura Pels Theatre. Buy tickets here.