A Pulitzer Prize-winning play currently on stage at the Philadelphia Theatre Company’s Suzanne Roberts Theatre deserves a lot of praise.
The title of the work, Primary Trust, may sound as dry as an insurance contract, but this complex work by Eboni Booth and directed by Amina Robinson, cuts straight to the human heart.
We meet Kenneth (Newton Buchanan), a lonely, soft-spoken monotone black guy who works in an old dusty bookstore. His boss is a cantankerous old white guy — the kind of bookseller that doesn’t exist anymore — who invites the friendless Kenneth to his house every year for Thanksgiving. Their little town is a sort of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and the PTC cozy stage scenery depicting the town square where the action takes place is visually mesmerizing. It’s here where Kenneth does the same thing every day: going to Happy Hour everyday after work to a place called Wally’s where he drinks with his imaginary friend, Bert (Akeem Davis).
Kenneth’s life is safe, isolated and predictable but when bookseller Clay (David Ingram) announces he wants to sell the store and retire to Arizona, Kenneth panics. Yet this is no ordinary panic but the result of a childhood trauma not revealed until the end of the play.
The sale of the bookstore forces Kenneth out of a decades-long stupor. At Wally’s, Kenneth meets the waitress Corrina (Taysha Marie Canales), and things develop although not in the way one might imagine. As Kenneth’s life slowly normalizes, Bert, the imaginary friend, begins to fade from view. As inconsequential as this may seem, this isn’t what the playwright makes you feel. Bert, in a way, had become the audience’s imaginary friend who seemed all too real.
What’s remarkable about this play, especially in the woke world of city theater, is the fact that we get to experience the life of Kenneth, a human being who happens to be black, and then witness his life transformation without the intrusion of “race” as political baggage to fit certain narratives.
