Primary Trust
TheaterWorks
Hartford
April 26, 2025
Did you ever have an imaginary friend? How long was it before that friend finally moved onto their own life? Years? Decades even?
Primary Trust is a wonderful play that tells the story of Kenneth, a 38-year-old man with a pretty regular life. He has a decent job at a bookstore, a place to himself and a favorite bar that he haunts called Wally’s. The one thing he doesn’t have is much of a social life, except for his best friend, a guy named Bert that he’s been through thick and thin with. There’s only one truly remarkable thing about Kenneth’s life — Bert is imaginary.
What I appreciated most about Primary Trust is how it handles Kenneth. He’s allowed to be vulnerable and damaged without descending all the way into craziness. Part of this is thanks to Eboni Booth’s outstanding script. (She won the Pulitzer Prize for the play in 2024.) She fully draws out Kenneth as a full human being, and not a caricature of modern loneliness tropes or a prisoner to his own trauma, which plays a role in his life to the present.
The rest of the praise belongs with Justin Weaks, who brings Kenneth to life as a character whom we can not only relate to, but recognize ourselves in. We’ve all dealt with loneliness before. We’ve all had the terribly jarring experience of losing a job that we’ve come to depend on, and maybe even enjoyed. We all even talk to ourselves from time to time — usually when we want to confirm our own biases and poor decision-making.
Weaks takes Kenneth and tunes up his emotions to an 11.5 on the 10 point scale. He’s a slightly more depressed, slightly more insecure, and slightly more needy version of all of us. Keeping Kenneth at 11.5 is actually an accomplishment, because it would have been too easy to turn Kenneth into a hammy laughingstock or a pathetic, weepy mess. Weaks embodies the contradictions of a man who wishes to escape the kind of pain that few of us ever directly confront, yet who has come to find familiarity, and even comfort in his suffering.
The rest of the cast brings the play to life, too. Samuel Stricklen is a believable imaginary friend as Bert. What’s interesting about the portrayal of Bert is that he isn’t given much of a personality beyond Kenneth, which makes sense because he’s a part of Kenneth. Where a less talented playwright/actor combination would have made this seem like a shortcoming, it’s a strength in the play because Kenneth is reflected back at himself in subtle ways. Stricklen doesn’t try to make Bert larger than the man who created him.
Ricardo Chivera and Hilary Ward, who play several characters throughout the play, are the primary comic relief of the play, and both do a great job as people who care about Kenneth, and as silly one-offs that simultaneously enlarge the world that Kenneth inhabits. Chivera is especially humorous as a manager at the bank Primary Trust, a former football star who's trying to recapture his glory days in the form of excellent customer service. Ward puts her talents to use with a bunch of character work that both reveals important information about Kenneth and entertains the audience.
I haven’t talked much about the plot, because I don’t want to give away the experience of traveling down the winding path of the play’s 90 minutes. It was a wonderful experience, and a great example that award-winning plays don’t have to deal with dark, existential themes or heaviness like death and violence. Plays can be funny and entertaining. Primary Trust accomplishes both being a crowd pleaser and a serious work of theater.
NEXT
Primary Trust continues at TheaterWorks through May 11.
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