Signature’s ‘Primary Trust’ Finds Compassion in Character
Pulitzer winner "Primary Trust" powerfully evokes the perspective of an emotionally damaged man trying to change his life.
Every single day, for 20 years straight, bookstore assistant Kenneth has headed after work to Wally’s Tiki Bar to get blitzed on Mai Tais with his best friend Bert. Wally’s, as Kenneth informs the audience at the top of Eboni Booth’s 2024 Pulitzer-winning drama Primary Trust, is his favorite place in Cranberry, New York, the sleepy Rochester suburb he’s called home all 38 years of his life.
Standing center stage, Kenneth (Julius Thomas III) proudly points out Wally’s among the buildings and homes of Cranberry, modeled in relief around the walls of Signature’s ARK Theatre. He speaks of the place with childlike joy, admitting he might be prone to angry outbursts on occasion, but all’s well as long as he’s got Wally’s and Mai Tais after work with Bert.
Then, one day, Kenneth learns that the routine he’s clung to for years will be upended utterly. He’ll need to grab some other lifeline — or drown. But maybe he’s okay with drowning. He’ll just go down drinking Mai Tais.
Allowing Kenneth the grace to define himself and his issues for his attentive audience, the play gently probes the question of whether he’s equipped for the changes coming his way. His emotional challenges and apparent alcoholism are presented with a sensitivity and dry humor that creates space for us inside his head, while director Taylor Reynolds plants us firmly in his POV.
From Kenneth’s perspective, we understand how vital is his routine, his job at the bookstore, his connection to the few friends in his life, including bookstore owner Sam (Craig Wallace), and, of course, best friend Bert (Frank Britton). To lose any one of them could prove disastrous to a man who clearly already has suffered much.
Thomas is open and gregarious in the role, employing Kenneth’s effusive smile as an expression of the contentment he finds in his routine, as well as a patch over painful wounds from his past. Eventually, that trauma comes pouring out, although Thomas’s grasp of the character feels stronger when Kenneth is smiling through pain rather than when he submits to it.
Our trip to the bottom of Kenneth’s traumatic past reveals that his friendship with Bert is also a patch. Bert isn’t real. He’s real to Kenneth, and to us, but he’s imaginary, and a tricky role to pull off that Britton delivers with aplomb.
Bert is solid and stable in a warm, cozy fashion reflected in his pleasant manner and lived-in cardigan. Though only a figment of Kenneth’s imagination, Bert also represents a real figure in Kenneth’s memory since childhood. Britton’s performance does well to suggest who that real person was, now stuck permanently in Kenneth’s head, as he knew him at the time.
Portraying people who are actually present in Kenneth’s life, Wallace imbues both bookstore owner Sam, and understanding bank manager Clay with the sort of compassion that makes Cranberry a hospitable home for a man with mental struggles like Kenneth.
And Yesenia Iglesias, playing the array of Wally’s servers who welcome Kenneth daily to the bar, provides consistent comedy with each server’s individual spin on the bar’s welcoming spiel. As Wally’s new waitress Corinna, Iglesias also draws us into the unlikely connection between her and this strange customer she sees talking to no one over Mai Tais.
Like Sam and Clay, Corinna shows Kenneth compassion. Just a touch is enough to make a difference in his life. People can be cruel, too, or insensitive, but Booth is eager here to consider the transformative power of caring.
Certainly, the traumas that haunt Kenneth turn out to have been ghastly and horrible, and though the hurt is past, he suffers still. In a beautifully written speech, he laments the “daily quiet happiness” that’s decimated by loss.
In such darkness, Kenneth learns, true friendship can be a beacon. It only takes one, Corinna tells him, just one (real) friend to change your life for the better, or, in a desperate moment, to be the lifeline that saves you from drowning.
Primary Trust (★★★☆☆) runs through Oct. 20 at Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave. in Arlington. Tickets are $40 to $93. Call 703-820-9771, or visit www.sigtheatre.org.
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