Essential Viewing: Primary Trust from PlayMakers Is a Richly Human and Warm Triumph

ARTS & CULTURE

By Pamir Kiciman
Correspondent

CHAPEL HILL — Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust debuted Off-Broadway in 2023 to vast critical acclaim, including the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The play is a gem. It celebrates ordinariness and the everyday. One of the play’s major accomplishments is that it is never overwrought, despite simmering with childhood trauma and isolation.

Primary Trust is populated with endearing characters in the fictional town of Cranberry, New York, near Rochester, set before the age of smartphones, and quickly captures the audience in a story that keeps them rapt.

Kenneth is both the play’s protagonist and narrator. He is a 38-year-old Black man whose life is upended when he loses his bookstore job of 18 years because the owner, Sam, is moving away for his health.

Primary Trust requires only four actors and a musician, tastefully and precisely delivered by Alex Thompson. One embodies Kenneth, and the other, Bert, who Kenneth tells us early on is his imaginary best friend. The other two actors play multiple roles.

Despite weather interruptions, Wednesday’s rescheduled opening night at PlayMakers Repertory Company was a delightful display of naturalistic acting, with the smoothest, flawless transitions on a set of clever, diminutive small-town buildings, and a lighting design that evoked a sense of nostalgia.

All elements of the production worked in cohesive harmony, skillfully carrying out the playwright’s intentions.

Much credit goes to the experienced director, NJ Agwuna. There is a sensitivity to the emotional beats of the story, coupled with uncanny pacing and rhythm that flows like the river running alongside Cranberry.

The darker depths of the human psyche that the play regularly explores could easily become melodramatic, but there’s not even a whiff of it.

This balance — focusing on storytelling, the humanity of the characters, and the text’s built-in tenderness and spry humor — is an achievement for Agwuna, the cast, and the production team.

In the lead, Nate John Mark gives a heartfelt, warm performance, resonating from his chest and face, with nuance and range.

Kenneth opens the play, directly describing to the audience that his story is about loneliness and then reframing it as a tale of friendship. From there, he launches into a tour of quaint Cranberry.

These crucial first few minutes are make-or-break for the remainder of the 95-minute, intermissionless show.

Nate engagingly delivers the opening, is instantly likable, and bears the arc of his story and the collective story of Primary Trust with vulnerability and depth.

Samuel Ray Gates never allows Bert to be a disembodied voice. He portrays him as a real character and truly Kenneth’s best friend. He is reasoned and supportive. There is an easy camaraderie and agility between Gates and Nate that serves this relationship very well.

Gates shows great care as an authentic champion, coach, and emotional support for Kenneth. His encouragement and guidance aren’t by rote but genuine and kind. In ensemble scenes, he intervenes delicately without pulling focus.

Nate John Mark as Kenneth (left) and Samuel Ray Gates as Bert (right). Photo by HuthPhoto, courtesy of PlayMakers Repertory Company.

Rasool Jahan takes on multiple characters as waiters and bank customers, and dispenses with them in a stunning quick-change choreography of accents, attitudes, and considerable memorization skills.

Jahan also portrays Corrina, one of the pivotal characters in the community of care that surrounds Kenneth and leads him out of his alienation. In all instances, she is perfectly timed and pitched, giving dimensionality to even the shortest lines, and infusing Corrina with the kindness that is a throughline in the play.

Jeffrey Blair Cornell undertakes two main characters with consistency and differentiation. Both are Kenneth’s bosses: Sam, the bookstore owner, and Clay, who gives him his next job as a bank teller.

Kenneth has known Sam for twenty years. His mother moved to Cranberry from the Bronx when she was pregnant with him, and he hasn’t ventured anywhere else.

Cornell also fashions a comedic turn as the French bartender at Le Pousselet. He sashays in and out and lays and removes a white tablecloth with flair.

Authentic in each role, Cornell embodies real people in Kenneth’s lifestory. He represents the past as Sam, the present as Clay, and the new and adventurous as the bartender.

Cornell spends most of his time on stage as Clay, giving him a chance to flesh out this character who recognizes qualities in Kenneth and relates to him because of his own brother. He gives him a new job and, when Kenneth has an outburst with a demanding customer, a second chance.

Kenneth has been a nightly regular only at Wally’s, “a tiki hut with carpeting,” where he overindulges in mai tais with Bert. He’s never had tequila or a martini.

He loses his mother at 10 and goes to an orphanage and later into foster care. The emotional bombs in Primary Trust come casually, like the brief mention of loneliness at the opening, and his acknowledgment of difficulties in foster care.

Kenneth spins at times and has meltdowns. Once, because he’s both excited and overwhelmed by the bank teller job. A far worse one when Bert leaves. He admits to having no friends, and no one in Cranberry really knows who he is.

Of his mother, he says, “There was a daily quiet happiness that I lost when I lost her.” Kenneth’s world is very small, and he’s stuck in familiarity and limitation.

Yet, he has a talent for cross-selling at the bank, thinks about going back to school, and has enrolled in Spanish classes with thoughts of visiting Spain.

On stage now through February 15, PlayMakers’ timely staging of Primary Trust carries an uplifting and reflective message that the world is not as cruel as it might appear, and that even an adult needs a responsive village sometimes to see him through.

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