Review: PRIMARY TRUST at Trinity Repertory Company
Production Runs through May 10th
All of us have our safe space, our comfort zone amidst the chaos of the world but what if that's where you spend most of your time and suddenly, that safe space is shattered? Can you even recover? Where would you go from there?
Trinity Repertory Company's new play is the wonderful 2024 Pulitzer Prize winning Play "Primary Trust", a play about a lonely man Kenneth, played by the ultra-talented Taavon Gamble, stuck in a rut of life of his own making that he prefers to be in anyway. Go to work, leave work, go to Happy Hour, buy Mai Tai's, go home, wake up, go to work....rinse and repeat. But when Kenneth's long-time bookstore job gets upended when the owner decides to sell, Kenneth's world turns upside down as he is confronted with something he knows very little about or wants to ever get to know: change.
While Gamble puts on the performance of a lifetime as this sheltered, lonely yet mostly-content, aspergers-ish Kenneth, the cast is an incredible mix of huge talents from Rudy Cabrera as Kenneth's guiding yet invisible friend Bert to Marina Tejada as Kenneth's favorite energetic restaurant waitress to the incredible Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Program student Daniel Shtivelberg as Kenneth's new boss at the Primary Trust bank.
This new comedy-drama set in a suburb of Rochester, New York called Cranberry with a slightly-annoying tagline "Welcome Friends, You're Right on Time!" , will tug at your heartstrings(the wife cried all the way back to our car) and make you ponder your own lifes failings and isolation in a world now more isolated then ever. What price do you pay for a life that never changes? When was the last time you made a new friend? When do you ever get out of your comfort zone?
If there's one word you leave with after watching "Primary Trust", which is now one of the most produced new shows in the US and a fitting play for Trinity Rep's cutting edge approach, it's the word "hope". If Kenneth, with a history of trauma as a child whose embedded his life on the comfort of things he can control, can change-can make new friends-can get out of the only places he's even wanted to be then so can we dammit. We watch these plays and we sit in our chairs and think wow, what a life he has. But how far off are our lives from his? Probably not as far as we think.
"Primary Trust" is an incredible piece of writing and acting, running 95 minutes without intermission and one you will thoroughly enjoy and think about long after its over. And that's a good thing. Call an old friend you haven't talked to in years. Talk to someone at work you've avoided for whatever reason. Go somewhere new to eat or to have a drink and talk to a stranger there. Embrace the change while you still can.
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