Primary Trust
Laura Pels Theater, New York City ★★★★
The Good Place’s William Jackson Harper is currently starring in an off-Broadway play that “feels like a throwback to another theatrical era,” said Charles Isherwood in The Wall Street Journal. Harper plays Kenneth, a shy bookstore employee in upstate New York who passes his evenings drinking mai tais at a tiki bar while swapping stories with his best friend, Bert. There’s a catch: Bert, we learn, is imaginary—unseen by everyone except Kenneth, who invented Bert years ago to cope with a childhood trauma. But even when Kenneth learns that the bookstore is closing, he doesn’t have to face the challenge of moving on alone. Playwright Eboni Booth, whose writing “has a clarity, simplicity, and bloom that are increasingly rare,” populates her fictional town with sympathetic characters. Harper, meanwhile, “gives a performance of such tenderness that audience members may find themselves fighting the urge to rush the stage and give him a big hug.”
The setup, including a set that resembles a miniature small town, “tiptoes toward a worrisome level of whimsy,” said Jackson McHenry in NYMag.com. But director Knud Adams “pulls back from laying it on too thick,” and “Harper is always there to ground things.” Though we learn the source of Kenneth’s psychic wounds, “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.” Kenneth becomes a teller at the local bank and works at connecting with a waitress at the bar. As he does so, Primary Trust becomes a loving tribute to “the pleasure of small-scale routine familiarity, the kind of thing that undergirds any long-term friendship.”