Interview: Petey McGee of PRIMARY TRUST at Center Theatre Group

Petey McGee is preparing to play Kenneth in Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust at CTG, and the process has invited him to reflect on how being an outsider affects each of us. McGee was in the middle of a film shoot in Philadelphia when he got the call to audition for the LA premiere of this Pulitzer Prize-winning play. “I had a really hard time getting my audition done during filming,” he recalls, “but this play has a through-line of grief and trauma that I latched onto. I understood (Kenneth’s) grief in ways that I don’t always understand grief when we see it on stage. My grief may not manifest in the same way as Kenneth’s, but I relate to his creation of a safety bubble as he tries to crawl through the desolation and peek his head above the clouds to see the sunshine.”

Once McGee was cast, he was intimidated to learn he would be joining a team that had mostly already worked on productions of the play together before. “I’m the new face in this production,” he thought. Initially, McGee felt he should be cautious. In taking on the leading role, he didn’t want to “break the gel” the team already had going. However, somewhere along the rehearsal process, he had a breakthrough. “I was meant to mess up the vibe and change everything. When a new actor takes on a leading role, they have a different temperament and it becomes a completely different play now.” McGee credits director Knud Adams with creating a “collaborative and symbiotic” process which allowed McGee to gel in his own way with the already-established team.

A self-proclaimed East-Coaster through and through, McGee has been enjoying his first extended visit to LA by scouting out the best tacos in the city. He has already extrapolated that the trucks and street stands hold the most promising options, but if you see him after the show, he is eager to hear suggestions from locals. One of the most important characters in the play, after all, is the town of Cranberry, New York, which McGee feels that scenic designer Marsha Ginsberg has conveyed in a “worn, lived-in” way. “The sets make it so easy for me to believe that I am there and that I’ve lived there my whole life.” While other actors are performing vocal warmups, McGee finds time to ground himself with the set. He hopes audiences can sense the local flair of Cranberry in the production.

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