Primary Trust - by Eboni Booth (Paperback)

About the Book

"Thirty-eight-year-old Kenneth lives a comfortable life of routine in suburban New York: after days spent working at a used bookstore, he whiles away his evenings knocking back mai tais with his best friend Burt at the local tiki bar. But when the long-time bookstore owner decides to close up shop for good, Kenneth panics at the prospect of finding a new job -- a process that unearths long-suppressed fears. When Kenneth makes a new friend named Corrina, and she begins to ask questions Kenneth isn't prepared to answer: how many mai tais is too many mai tais? And who or what is Burt? Primary Trust is a deeply affecting play about the careful structures we build to contain oceans of feeling and what happens when those structures begin to crumble."--

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Primary Trust is an arresting character study of an isolated man finding the courage to expand his world and begin again.

Thirty-eight-year-old Kenneth lives a comfortable life of routine in suburban New York: after days spent working at a used bookstore, he whiles away his evenings knocking back mai tais with his best friend Burt at the local tiki bar. But when the long-time bookstore owner decides to close up shop for good, Kenneth panics at the prospect of finding a new job--a process that unearths long-suppressed fears. When Kenneth makes a new friend named Corrina, and she begins to ask questions Kenneth isn't prepared to answer: how many mai tais is too many mai tais? And who--or what--is Burt? Primary Trust is a deeply affecting play about the careful structures we build to contain oceans of feeling and what happens when those structures begin to crumble.

Review Quotes

"A simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth, illustrating how small acts of kindness can change a person's life and enrich an entire community."

--Pulitzer Prize Committee

"Eboni Booth's portrait of one man's loneliness and the danger of coping mechanisms will restore your faith in theater's elemental storytelling powers."

--Observer

"[The] most moving new play I've seen this year. Booth joins Samuel D. Hunter as a playwright who has carved out a space onstage for forgotten people in forgotten places, voices that have a lot to say if we would only listen."

--TheaterMania

"New York City's best new play...[A] buffed-to-gleaming jewel, following the life of a handsome, charming man named Kenneth, who--capsized early in life by a horrifically traumatic event--struggles, mulls, deflects, and cheerfully and not-so-cheerfully interrogates how to progress with his life in the suburb of Cranberry, New York."

--Daily Beast

"[A] tender, delicately detailed portrait... Booth again probes the half-dread of working-class Black characters in a one-freeway-exit corner of the Northeast."

--New York Times

"A quiet gem that you're likely to find yourself thinking about long after it's concluded, Primary Trust proves a deeply humanistic portrait of the sort of existential abyss into which we're all capable of falling."

--New York Stage Review

"Primary Trust is not a play where a grand revelation is coming toward you. It's more about the climb Kenneth faces as he's slowly becoming reacquainted with the world, turning from an imaginary friendship to real ones."

--Vulture

"A simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth, illustrating how small acts of kindness can change a person's life and enrich an entire community."

-Pulitzer Prize Committee

"Eboni Booth's portrait of one man's loneliness and the danger of coping mechanisms will restore your faith in theater's elemental storytelling powers."

--Observer

"[The] most moving new play I've seen this year. Booth joins Samuel D. Hunter as a playwright who has carved out a space onstage for forgotten people in forgotten places, voices that have a lot to say if we would only listen."

--TheaterMania

"New York City's best new play...[A] buffed-to-gleaming jewel, following the life of a handsome, charming man named Kenneth, who--capsized early in life by a horrifically traumatic event--struggles, mulls, deflects, and cheerfully and not-so-cheerfully interrogates how to progress with his life in the suburb of Cranberry, New York."

--Daily Beast

"[A] tender, delicately detailed portrait... Booth again probes the half-dread of working-class Black characters in a one-freeway-exit corner of the Northeast."

--New York Times

"A quiet gem that you're likely to find yourself thinking about long after it's concluded, Primary Trust proves a deeply humanistic portrait of the sort of existential abyss into which we're all capable of falling."

--New York Stage Review

"Primary Trust is not a play where a grand revelation is coming toward you. It's more about the climb Kenneth faces as he's slowly becoming reacquainted with the world, turning from an imaginary friendship to real ones."

--Vulture

About the Author

Eboni Booth is a writer and actor from New York City. Her plays include Primary Trust (Roundabout Theatre, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Outer Critics Circle Award) and Paris (Atlantic Theater). For television, she has written for Hulu's We Were the Lucky Ones and HBO Max's Julia. As an actor, she has appeared in productions at Playwrights Horizons, LCT3, Manhattan Theater Club, Ars Nova, WP Theater, Page 73, Soho Rep., Clubbed Thumb, and more. Booth is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, and the recipient of a Dramatists Guild Horton Foote Award, a Steinberg Playwright Award, a Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, and a John Gassner Award. She is a graduate of Juilliard's playwriting program and the University of Vermont.