Play of the Week: Primary Trust

Avid theatregoers look forward to the Pulitzer (Prize for Drama) announcement like Catholics waiting for white smoke outside the papal conclave. It's usually a pretty good indicator of what's fresh and exciting in the American theatre and a very good indicator of at least one title that will appear in one of your regional theatre's season announcements. I've seen both The Hot Wing King (2021) and Fat Ham (2022) locally in the last 12ish months, for example. I liked them both just fine (I'm always down for a Shakespeare riff), but the hype probably hurt both works in my estimation.

I can't say I follow the build-up to the announcement, though I know that some do and I'm sure some even bet on their favorites on FanDuel, though that's really only possible for New York audiences. If you're in a regional theatre city - we live in Baltimore but see a majority of our theatre in Washington, D.C. - the Pulitzer announcement is like trickle-down economics if it actually worked. The folks in New York see the play first, it wins the Pulitzer, then we get to see it.

In the DMV, two productions of Primary Trust, the 2024 winner from Eboni Booth, have popped up in the past six months, at Arlington's Signature Theatre and Baltimore's Everyman Theatre. I told someone, it must've been at some sort of theatre party or reception, that we planned on seeing both to "compare" (and by that, I mean see how two very different companies approach the same material), and she obnoxiously responded, "Well, unless you have tickets for Signature's production already, you aren't going." She said it in the way that people do when they think you're stupid, turning up her nose at me. I kind of blew her off and thought to myself, "I wouldn't have engaged in conversation with this woman if I had known that she'd be so snooty."

Unfortunately, she was right! Signature was pretty well sold out when I checked the next day, even performances like Tuesday and Sunday evenings. Good for Sig, I'm sure they sent an obnoxious email about it.

Luckily for us, Everyman is our local theatre of choice anyway. Less than ten minutes away from our front door (with traffic, Signature can be almost 90 minutes), we can park for cheap/free, and nothing about our experience needs to be a big deal. And when they said that Primary Trust ran 90 minutes without an intermission, they really meant, "It's 75 minutes but if we told anybody that, nobody would pay these ticket prices." That's music to my ears!

The play follows Kenneth, a fella with a pretty cheery disposition toward life. He likes his job at the bookstore fine because it pays him enough money to drink mai tais every night at his favorite tiki bar. There, he meets up with his best friend Bert (great best friend name, by the way) and the two just talk and talk and drink more mai tais and talk. It's a simple life, but it's all he needs. He's a simple guy.

It's a shame that Bert is imaginary.

It's Booth's riff on Harvey, the 1945 Pulitzer winner made popular by the 1950 Jimmy Stewart film, about a similarly affable guy whose best friend is an imaginary six-foot rabbit. Harvey had already gotten a midnight movie, cult classic spin in weirdo auteur Richard Kelly's debut feature Donnie Darko, but I guess we still needed the situation comedy version. Primary Trust is like if one of the kids on Sesame Street never really grew up.

It probably feels that way to me because, for the Everyman production, Paige Hathaway's scenic design was bright and full of color, the scale of the buildings dwarfed by the adult heights. Booth also lists the play's time period in the script as "before smart phones," which makes me think of my childhood, my Y2Kidz days spent watching Jim Henson and Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl characters.

The mood is also pretty free and easy, considering the traumatic past that Kenneth must reveal to explain his imaginary friend. The mai tais (I've never had a mai tai before, but I've never wanted one more than after seeing this show - Taylor thinks I will like them) flow (he drinks both his and Bert's) and he gets plenty of weird looks from the rest of the town (he's clearly just the local weirdo to many of its inhabitants), but it's all light-hearted and often silly. Kenneth doesn't really understand that he's troubled, so his happy-go-lucky attitude in his frequent direct addresses to the audience makes his struggles seem manageable. That's probably what I liked most about Primary Trust - not every play needs to be traumatic or melodramatic or another word used to describe plays that ends in -tic. Maybe we can tackle all of the same things in a breath of fresh air, unique kinda way. I guess that's how you win Pulitzers.

Primary Trust at Baltimore's Everyman Theatre