The play Primary Trust was developed in 2021. Eboni Booth won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for it, and the play quickly became one of the most-produced plays in the country.
At Austin Playhouse, Robert Joseph (as Kenneth) delivers a true ‘artistic’ performance, as I describe below. “An accountant by day and an actor by nlght,” as the programme notes state, Joseph is on stage for the entire 93 minutes.
In the background of Kenneth’s now-adult self is the traumatic death of his Mother. He dragged her to storage closet and it was 6 days before they were found by a social worker, who then visited him in a holding area for children. This memory of the social worker helping him was reality, but because of the stress he turned that guy into an imaginary character named Bert, sensitively played here by Marc A. Pouhé.
From then on, wherever he went, and whatever he did, this character Bert was there to support him. He would sit for hours in the corner of the local Tiki bar without talking to anybody except his imaginary friend.
While watching this play, close your eyes for a short time, and imagine it as a painting. The strange word tronie describes a painting done from the imagination, as a character study, though every bit as real and individual and feasible as any portrait. Unlike a real portrait, the subject of a tronie is imaginary. With his deft handling of an artistic paintbrush, Joseph creates a tronie for the audience.
The play hinges on a crisis that develops as he makes a real friend: a waitress (played by Vivian Noble), who suggests he apply for a bank job (Primary Trust) since the bookstore he worked in closed for good. It is then that his imaginary friend leaves. He changed his allegiance to her and this is why his mind was now void of the character.
But the adjustment was too much. Without him to get through hard times, Kenneth experiences a psychic break. He felt guilty by having this friendship. It broke the primary trust he shared with Bert.
It’s a psychosis where he loses touch with reality and experiences intense disruptive symptoms: a hallucination of sorts. The break happens at his place of work, the bank, in the presence of his boss, played by Huck Huckaby, a likeable and versatile actor who has appeared in dozens of Austin Playhouse productions.
Kenneth’s psychological state can again best be expressed as a tronie: as a character study, tronies serve as explorations of a panoply of psychological states. Joseph’s delineation of this is certainly worthy of the playwright’s loftiest intention.
Nobody tried to help Kenneth all those years (he is late 30s in the play). He was apparently regarded as a very strange person, but the fact no one reached out strikes me as even odder. Today he would be treated with anti-psychotic medication. Throughout his adulthood, cognitive behaviour therapy was lacking, to put it mildly. It seems unreasonable to me that a guy could be seen practically every day for years in the same corner of a tiki bar without someone reaching out to social services, but one must suspend disbelief for the sake of drama.
What Eboni Booth has done here is a classic case of the ‘cult of slow art’. The concept was perfected by Leonardo da Vinci, when he painted the Last Supper: he would spend days without touching the work, examining each figure much a Freud would later examine his patients.
Austin is lucky to have such a talented group of four actors who could express the slow burn of Primary Trust, backed up by the live music performed on stage by James Davery.
There were smiles on many faces as I left the venue near UT. One couple I spoke to said their new favourite line will be “Take me to the Radisson!” To find out why that is such a catchy aspect of the play, you will have to buy a ticket and see it for yourself at one of Austin’s finest theatre companies: Austin Playhouse.
Photos by Steve Rogers
Lead photo (l to r): Huckaby, Pouhé, Joseph
Second photo: Joseph and Noble
Primary Trust is being performed until Oct 4/26.
Location: 405 W 22nd St, Austin.