It’s easy to let your empathy muscles atrophy when you live in a big city like New York. You encounter homeless, mentally ill, and addicted people everywhere you turn, and the inevitable result is that you often merely ignore them and go on your way. Primary Trust, the new play by Eboni Booth (Paris) receiving its world premiere from the Roundabout Theatre Company, provides an excellent way to get those muscles working again.
The play revolves around 38-year-old Kenneth (William Jackson Harper), an emotionally fragile, lonely man who lives in a quiet Upstate New York suburb and has settled into a routine existence revolving around his job at a used book store and nights spent drinking endless amounts of Mai Tais with his best friend, Bert (Eric Berryman), at his favorite haunt, Wally’s Place, “New York’s oldest tiki hut” restaurant. No one in town seems to mind very much that Bert is a figment of Kenneth’s imagination, something of which he is fully aware.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Besides providing convivial conversation and company, Bert also proves quite helpful, frequently providing pep talks when unfortunate things happen, such as Kenneth being informed by his good-hearted boss (Jay O. Sanders) that he’s being forced to close the store for health reasons. Bert even coaches Kenneth through his subsequent job interview with Clay (Sanders, again), the manager of the local bank to which Kenneth has been encouraged to apply by Corrina (April Matthis, Toni Stone, in one of several roles), a waitress with whom he strikes up a casual friendship.
Kenneth provides a running narration of these events, frequently pausing to collect himself as his feelings overtake him. It becomes clear that he’s always on the verge of emotional collapse, and it’s only late in the play that we learn about the traumatic events that have caused him to retreat into his protective shell.
Long before then, however, we’ve come to care deeply about the character, thanks not only to the beautiful writing that expertly blends emotion with humor but also to Harper’s brilliant performance. The actor, best known for the acclaimed NBC comedy The Good Place, delivers such a quietly nuanced, emotionally rich portrayal that you find yourself fully invested in his character’s fate (there was more than one full-throated “aww” emanating from audience members at various points in the evening when good things happen to Kenneth).
Primary Trust is very much a slow burn, with director Knud Adams trusting the material enough to let it play out in an unhurried rhythm. It’s easy to see that the play might prove underwhelming in less talented hands, but here it emerges as a quiet gem that is all the more effective for its restraint.
Besides the superb performances from the ensemble — Berryman exudes likeability as the “friend” from whom Kenneth takes comfort, Matthis dazzles in a variety of roles, and Sanders demonstrates yet again that he’s one of the best actors on the New York stage — the production benefits greatly from Marsha Ginsberg’s whimsical set design depicting the town’s buildings in miniature and the haunting, virtuosic musical accompaniment by Luke Wygodny on a variety of instruments. The one element that seems extraneous is the repeated ringing of a small bell that proves more irritating than evocative.
A quiet gem that you’re likely to find yourself thinking about long after it’s concluded, Primary Trust proves a deeply humanistic portrait of the sort of existential abyss into which we’re all capable of falling.
