Description:
Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Primary Trust is an arresting character study of an isolated man finding the courage to expand his world and begin again.
Thirty-eight-year-old Kenneth lives a comfortable life of routine in suburban New York: after days spent working at a used bookstore, he whiles away his evenings knocking back mai tais with his best friend Burt at the local tiki bar. But when the long-time bookstore owner decides to close up shop for good, Kenneth panics at the prospect of finding a new job--a process that unearths long-suppressed fears. When Kenneth makes a new friend named Corrina, and she begins to ask questions Kenneth isn't prepared to answer: how many mai tais is too many mai tais? And who--or what--is Burt? Primary Trust is a deeply affecting play about the careful structures we build to contain oceans of feeling and what happens when those structures begin to crumble.
Review Quotes:
"A simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth, illustrating how small acts of kindness can change a person's life and enrich an entire community."
-Pulitzer Prize Committee"Eboni Booth's portrait of one man's loneliness and the danger of coping mechanisms will restore your faith in theater's elemental storytelling powers."
--Observer"[The] most moving new play I've seen this year. Booth joins Samuel D. Hunter as a playwright who has carved out a space onstage for forgotten people in forgotten places, voices that have a lot to say if we would only listen."
--TheaterMania"New York City's best new play...[A] buffed-to-gleaming jewel, following the life of a handsome, charming man named Kenneth, who--capsized early in life by a horrifically traumatic event--struggles, mulls, deflects, and cheerfully and not-so-cheerfully interrogates how to progress with his life in the suburb of Cranberry, New York."
--Daily Beast"[A] tender, delicately detailed portrait... Booth again probes the half-dread of working-class Black characters in a one-freeway-exit corner of the Northeast."
--New York Times"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."
--New York Stage Review"Primary Trust is not a play where a grand revelation is coming toward you. It's more about the climb Kenneth faces as he's slowly becoming reacquainted with the world, turning from an imaginary friendship to real ones."
--Vulture