What a great production of a great new play! Seattle Rep’s Primary Trust is a comedy that comes out of the black experience, which is both sweet and very, very funny, and well worth my time to get to Seattle—I live pretty far away from the city. I loved it, a lot.
First, the actors are all excellent, but that was only part of the treat. Watching them together was a great pleasure as they worked off of one another, with the music provided by Justin Huertas.
The plot’s pretty simple—Kenneth at 10 years old has lost his mother to death, and locks himself in the kitchen pantry with her body until his social worker, Bert, finds him six days later and finds him a home. The relationship between the two actors playing Bert and Kenneth is great—and Andrew Lee Creech plays two roles, essentially. He is both a real-world Bert, the social worker assigned to Kenneth, and also the imaginary, or at least invisible, Bert who hangs around and drinks Mai Tais with Kenneth for years afterwards. Creech’s work is quite good, and he plays well with Kenneth (Stephen Tyrone Williams); Kenneth knows this Bert’s not real, but he doesn’t quite care. He needs the support and someone to talk to. Both are wonderful and easy to watch on stage as they go through Kenneth’s life.
The other two characters take on a number of roles: Allyson Lee Brown plays all of the many waitresses at Wally’s, the bar that Kenneth loves and in which he feels safe, but she also takes on the roles of Kenneth’s many customers at the bank he works for (the Primary Trust of the title). She's great as she presents a wide variety of servers at the bar, each with their own personality, accent and even walk.
One of those many servers is Corrina, with breaks between very short scenes as Kenneth begins to wonder about his life. It’s Corrina who encourages Kenneth to apply for a job and Rob Burgess (a wonderful character actor) his new boss. It turns out that Kenneth is a whiz at cross-selling; he soon becomes the highest performing employee in the entire branch (a small world in itself, but a big, big place for Kenneth). One of the nice choices that playwright Eboni Booth has made is to never allow us to think that Corrina is potentially available as a love interest. From the first, she is clear: she has a man and she's faithful to him, but she is a very good friend to Kenneth. We avoid all the clichés available to male and female characters with that choice, and I found it quite refreshing.
As the show moves through its paces, it could have been in danger of feeling dated, but it never ever does because the jokes are both so fresh and so deeply embedded in the plot. They’re not just funny, they advance the plot, which is all about Kenneth’s coming of age, even if he’s a bit delayed. And the question is deceptively simple: is he willing to give up his memories of Bert to move on in his real life? That makes this play an example of that favourite American genre, the dream play, one with echoes of The Glass Menagerie in the background. Like Tom in that play, Kenneth breaks the fourth wall and talks to us, giving us direct contact with his inner life. Like Tom, he lets us in to see who he is and why he makes the choices he does. (Stephen Tyrone Williams opens Kenneth up to us without ever making him maudlin or sentimental, another great job.)
Kaytlin McIntyre’s excellent direction brings all this out: the various characters at the bank and the various bosses are simultaneously stereotypes and moving Kenneth along his journey to full adulthood (he’s in his late thirties at the moment in which the play is set). Beautiful direction throughout leading excellent actors through their paces. Great work (again) from Seattle Rep.