Primary Trust at BCT

Or: The Loneliest Number

There’s a story in The Thousand and One Nights where a wise young woman is asked to name the second most important thing in life, after health. She answers friendship, and I can’t help wondering if Kenneth (Malcolm Barrett) would agree, or even flip the two. Living a solitary life in Cranberry New York, Kenneth is our guide through Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust, a meditation on life and loneliness and the power of friendship to save us.

Though over-shadowed by a devastating loss, Kenneth’s days are, if not happy, then certainly ordered. He works at used bookstore and spends his evenings at Wally’s (New York State’s Oldest Tikki Bar) drinking mahi tais with his best (and only) friend Bert (Ben Cain). Eternally kind, endlessly supportive Bert is the best thing and greatest constant in Kenneth’s life, but he has one … very particular deficiency. So when Kenneth loses his job, and Corrina (Cloie Wyatt Taylor) a new waitress at Wally’s points him towards a new one, he finds himself in a disordered cosmos, the dependable orbits all awry, Bert drawing away, and chances catastrophic failure (or, if he is brave enough, a new and sweeter life) looming all around him.

Through Kenneth, Booth’s simple, mildly surreal play takes our eyes to the far end of a telescope, pointed at lives of quite desperation. Her characters are all drawn from the mass of America, complacent but not contended. Throw away speeches of achingly normal things: an autumn walk, an office party, proper cat care, are framed with refreshing every day weirdness, in the voices of people you might find anywhere, though each flutters with a flock of idiosyncrasies. The arc of the play is gorgeously simple, and, without striving or fuss, lays its fingers on every key it wants to play.

Cloie Wyatt Taylor and David Anthony Smith (who plays both of Kenneth’s bosses, the crotchety Sam and the fervent but kindly Clay, along with an abundantly French waiter) zip in and out of the narrative with hummingbird quickness and dexterity. Taylor, in addition to the even-keeled Corrina (whom she kindles with earnest and gentle comedy), also plays a hoard of Cranberrians, who wash in and out of Kenneth’s life. Smith punctuates his characters with flourishes of wit and charm, and layers in a kindness that mixes well with the threatening chill of each of his character’s authority. Cain’s Bert is delightful, a patently good man (even his sweater is the platonic ideal of trustworthiness) but he still exudes the older man’s sense of his own …. particular deficiency, at least as far as his young friend is concerned.

All these however are satellites to Barrett’s sun. He fits the character, and the tenor of his playwright’s world, like a well made glove: not too wild, not too plain, but shaken by grief and anger and a fear that the best parts of his life lie shattered far in the past. Barrett’s Kenneth caries a precisely articulated, deeply ingrained sense that he is unfit for this life; too afraid, too volatile, too out of step, too too much. It is a fear that gleams in his small gestures, his fleeting facial expressions, his sudden silences, and every moment rings with poignancy and distressing need. We want him to succeed, to triumph, to climb out of the iron maiden he has implied himself inside, but we sit in the dramatically delicious sense that it may not be possible. That he will be adrift forever under the soft tropical lights of Wally’s (serenaded by Thomas Paul with a quiet keyboard and a loud shirt); lost on a private sea where the waters are sweet but no one will ever find him.