Exploring Loneliness, Finding Family at the Heart of La Jolla Playhouse’s ‘Primary Trust’ – San Diego Union-Tribune

Kenneth, the central character in playwright Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust,” regularly hangs out with the crowd at Wally’s Tiki Bar in fictional Cranberry, New York. He’s got a mai tai in his hand and a drinking buddy named Bert. But Kenneth is a stranger. Mostly to himself.

“It’s a play about someone trying to find the courage to face the world, which is really scary,” Booth said. “It can be scarier if you’ve fallen a lot. The little trip he (Kenneth) takes is monumental in terms of opening up and embracing the world around him.”

New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of “Primary Trust” debuted off-Broadway last year in the black box Laura Pels Theatre to much acclaim, winning an Obie Award for its star, William Jackson Harper, and the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Booth.

Starring Caleb Eberhardt as Kenneth, “Primary Trust” makes its West Coast premiere beginning this week at the 400-seat Mandell Weiss Forum Theatre at the La Jolla Playhouse. Knud Adams, who directed the 95-minute drama in New York, is also directing in La Jolla.

Booth wrote “Primary Trust” in 2019 while a graduate student on a Juilliard Playwright Fellowship. Her process after the first draft included working with Adams, whom she recalls as “very willing to work with me.”

“He’s my person,” Booth said of Adams. “He’s the only director I’ve ever worked with as a writer. He’s intelligent and he takes his job really seriously, and he pushes me to be a better writer and a better collaborator. This play wouldn’t exist without him. His mind, his eye and his heart are everywhere.”

In “Primary Trust,” 38-year-old Kenneth works in a bookstore where he has worked for 20 years, and sometimes, when he’s not visiting Wally, he drinks and chats with the enigmatic Bert (James Udom), and he works there himself.

But when Kenneth loses his job at the bookstore, he loses his community of coworkers and friends from the bar and becomes isolated. He later gets a new job at a local bank called Primary Trust. He also befriends a waitress at Wally’s named Corinna (Rebecca S’manga Frank). As Kenneth’s life changes, so does his relationship with his past and the people around him.

An aspiring actress before she turned to playwriting, Booth said she “spent a lot of time working in restaurants and bars, eating and drinking. The culture, especially the bar culture, is interesting to me. I worked in places where regulars would come in every day. I learned how you can create a community that way.”

Booth said she didn’t set out to write about it, but “I’m intrigued by loneliness. I write about the need for community and the difficulty of making connections. Emotionally, I often push myself away, trying to find people to love and feel close to.”

Although Primary Trust was written before the isolation and resulting loneliness that were brought on by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Booth was already considering “this issue of isolation. In my experience, it’s something that we struggle with and it’s how we live now. It can be a bit hostile to the spirit, it seems.”

“Even before 2020, I talked to people about the fact that I had an internal illness and internal unrest that was difficult to name.”

Booth remembers acting as “a tough job. It wasn’t until my mid-30s that I started to feel like I had something of a career. I managed to get cast in a few off-Broadway shows. It was exciting, and I felt lucky to be working with creative and engaging people. But it wasn’t enough to sustain me.”

But her acting experience seems to have had an impact on her ability to create real and empathetic characters as a writer. “Becoming a playwright,” she said, “was a way to connect those two parts of myself. I felt uneasy about saying I was a writer. But with writing plays, I heard it click in the back of my mind. Something about it felt right.”

Booth’s previous play, “Paris,” premiered off-Broadway in January 2020 at the Atlantic Theatre Company, founded by playwright David Mamet among others. Also directed by Knud Adams, it was set in Vermont, the same state where Booth, who was raised in the Bronx, N.Y., did her undergraduate studies.

Although “Paris” was well-received, Booth said, “it was my first production as a writer. I didn’t know anything. I was just grateful for the opportunity. I feel like I know a lot more about how to write a play now, but the mystery of it still seems to be there.”

Winning the Pulitzer for drama for “Primary Trust,” Booth said, “was very meaningful to me. You hope that what you write resonates. The fact that people seem to be able to come along for the ride and are touched by it means more to me than I can say. It’s very satisfying. I never want to stop thinking about it.”

Equally rewarding, she said, were conversations with people who had seen Primary Trust.

“I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me. I’m so overwhelmed,” Booth said. “They’ve talked a lot about their own feelings of loneliness, their own experiences of loss and grief, and trying to find the courage to live and be a vulnerable and emotional person in the world, and how difficult that can be.”

Now that Primary Trust is, as she puts it, “out in the world,” Booth has begun writing a new play. Just this month.

“I’m going to the ‘cave,’” she said, a place where writers seek refuge to begin writing. “Here we go.”

‘Basic Trust’

When: Previews, Tuesday through Saturday. Opening September 29 and running through October 20. 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 2:00 and 8:00 p.m. Saturdays; 1:00 and 7:00 p.m. Sundays

Where: Mandell Weiss Forum Theater at La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, UC San Diego, La Jolla

Tickets: $39-94

Phone: (858) 550-1010

On the web: lajollaplayhouse.org