If you’ve ever felt that going to the theater might not be worth the hassle and cost, here’s an argument on the other side: “Primary Trust,” the most unassuming, quirky, true, and revitalizing experience to arrive on the American stage in many a tinsel moon. Eboni Booth’s 2024 Pulitzer Prize winning play, now on stage at Houston’s Alley Theatre, is like that first day the breezes of autumn arrive after the long summer heat: a simple pleasure that restores.
The magic of this creation lies in its wonder at the possibility of restoration by means of the ordinary. “This is the story of a friendship,” the play’s protagonist Kenneth announces in the opening moments. “Of how I got a new job. A story of love and balance and time.” And so it is: the basic needs of every human life, and the play’s protagonist Kenneth needs them all. After a traumatic childhood left unrevealed until late in the play, Kennth has grown up working in a used bookstore, largely due to the charity of the store’s profane, chain-smoking curmudgeon of an owner, Sam, who announces he is two-packs away from death’s door and therefore moving from smalltown Cranberry, NY, to Arizona. With the departure of Sam, Kenneth is left with only one friend, Bert (David Rainey) whom he meets nightly at Wally’s, a Tiki Bar, serving bad Mai Tais. Balancing the tasteless happy hour drinks, Bert is the ideal friend: he listens, he laughs, he encourages. Indeed, he has only one flaw: he’s imaginary. “He exists only in my head,” Kenneth tells the audience “but that doesn’t make him any less real. He’s the realest thing I know.”
It’s a somberly comic line that epitomizes the sensibility of the show and establishes the tension and need at the heart of the play even as it offers a slim hope for a way out of one of our current culture’s most enigmatic and invisible troubles: loneliness. For though Kenneth lives in a place whose roadside announces the motto, “Welcome home! You’re right on time!” his existence is solitary. He has no welcoming home, and time is speeding by. Yet in his ability to imagine Bert he takes the first unconscious step toward recovery, aided by the unconscious encouragement of the people he encounters: decent human beings including an array of highly energized waiters who welcome him to Wally’s, the bartender at Cranberry’s one fancy restaurant, the supervisor at the bank where Kenneth applies for a job, the customers who walk up to his teller’s cage, and Corrina, Wally’s one restrained employee who strikes up a conversation with him on the street. Gently massaging the metaphor of the bank, Primary Trust, where he gets a job, Kenneth builds up a savings account of emotional courage that takes him through moments of backsliding and doubt and carries him forward to trust himself and accept others acceptance.
Stated this blandly, the situation almost suggests a Hallmark movie, but this show is anything but syrupy happy endings. The characters are much too fragile and plain. They require actors capable of frantic nuance: familiar and comic one moment; odd and a little threatening the next. This production’s cast handles this challenge perfectly. As Kenneth, Stanley Andrew Jackson seems not to act at all. Instead, he seems to stumble through events and comments to the audience. One moment he is passing the evening at Wally’s with Bert, refilling their bottomless Mai Tais; the next he is working up the courage to ask Clay, a supervisor at Primary Trust, for a teller’s job. At times, the script asks for all this in 30 seconds punctuated by lighting shifts and drumming sound effects. Yet Jackson never allows Kenneth to be less than human, less than someone you know. As the imaginary Bert, David Rainey is the even-keeled perfect friend who always has time for Kenneth. He knows how to be a crutch and how to give a kick in the seat. Rainey makes us, as well as Kenneth, forget that Bert’s imaginary—a guide to Kenneth’s inner self and journey. Michelle Elaine and Chris Hutchison both play a variety of roles, and they have the ability to make each one unique. They master the art of quick changes and never surrender to the impulse to ask us to wink at the actors beneath their wigs, costumes, and make up. They are comic but able to expand beyond comedy. As a company, they make the plot mesh like the pieces in a Rube Goldberg contraption that overcomes all its odd pieces to seem more real life than fictional drama.
Director Niegel Smith and scenic designer Michael Locher deserve tremendous credit for doing more with less. Smith balances scenes that press hours of time into seconds with those that slow down for a long look at where Kenneth is emotionally, and he gives each actor the room to expand their art. Locher’s stage is as simple as the plot seems to be but uses moving pieces and drop down neon signs to guide audiences along in the action.
Cast and crew together polish this small gem of a play until it outshines the diamonds in Tiffany’s displays. They make every facet glitter; they earn every laugh, smile, and eruption of joy at the possibilities around us—the reasons to hope. Do not miss this production. Trust that Cranberry’s road sign has it right in ways you’ll only know after seeing the play: “Welcome Home! You’re right on time!”
“Primary Trust” plays at the Alleys Neuhau Theatre through May 25.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.
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