Generally speaking, plays about ordinary people don’t make the most thrilling evenings of theater. We want to live vicariously through someone on the edge of a great adventure, to face demons we’d never have the courage to face ourselves, to watch a family snipe and squabble at the dinner table and say—hey, my family’s not so bad after all.
Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust, which just opened off-Broadway at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels, is about one of those regular guys, 38-year-old Kenneth (William Jackson Harper), who lives in the small-town Rochester suburb of Cranberry, N.Y., and works in a bookstore. His mom died when he was just 10, and he has only one friend, Bert (Eric Berryman). He spends his evenings drinking mai tais at Wally’s—where Corrina and every other server is played with varying degrees of enthusiasm by the delightful April Matthis (Toni Stone)—and doesn’t do much of anything else … until his boss (Rhinebeck Panorama’s Jay O. Sanders) decides to close up shop for health reasons.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
“This is the story of a friendship. Of how I got a new job. A story of love and balance and time. And the smallest of chances,” Kenneth tells us. And that’s the gist of Primary Trust: a quiet, unpretentious play about an unassuming man’s rather average life. But it gets under your skin, and causes that lump in your throat.
Much of the credit goes to Harper, an Emmy nominee for NBC’s The Good Place and off-Broadway vet (fun fact: In 2017, he shared the stage with Booth in Zoe Kazan’s post-apocalyptic drama After the Blast at LCT3), whose pitch-perfect portrayal of Kenneth is full of soul and sensitivity. Like so many of us, Kenneth experiences crippling social anxiety and struggles with serious change—e.g., interviewing for a job at the Primary Trust bank. “I have a brother. Got into a car accident in high school, hit his head pretty bad. You remind me of him,” new boss Clay (Sanders again) says affectionately. But Harper doesn’t play up or make a joke of those quirks or fears, nor does he turn his character into a caricature. Though we do get a chuckle out of his extremely limited experience with alcoholic beverages. “I’ve never had a martini,” he tells Corrina. She easily persuades him: “They’re one of life’s simple pleasures.”
Directed by Knud Adams, the smart, streamlined production moves at a smooth clip, with the ding of a call bell, like one you’d ring for service at a bank teller window, when we all used to go to bank teller windows (the play is set in the pre-smartphone era), indicating time passing and scene changes. After a few, the high-pitched pings stop jarring and simply fade into the background. Also in the background: live keyboard and string music by Luke Wygodny—a thoughtful touch.
As Clay muses over mai tais—Clay is not a fan of the rum-and-lime-juice concoction, and prefers tequila (“I drink enough to burn my face off”)—“There are days and then there are days.” Primary Trust is a story about days. You know the kind. We all have them.
Primary Trust opened May 25, 2023, at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre and runs through July 2. Tickets and information: roundabouttheatre.org
