"I miss wanting to win."Granville Island—Arts Club Theatre Company brings celebrated African-American playwright Eboni Booth's 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama-winning off-Broadway stage play Primary Trust to Vancouver for its Canadian premiere. It stars Andrew Broderick as the Mai Tai-sipping Kenneth (a role originated by William Jackson Harper), a thirty-eight-year-old suburban bookstore clerk who embarks on a journey of self-discovery after being laid off.
There are some unconventional choices made with the tender material and lead character who's an isolated lost soul with only a singular friend, the affable but imaginary Bert (Broadus Mattison), since being orphaned as a child twenty-eight years earlier. He spends most nights sitting quietly by himself at a rundown Tiki bar drinking all night barely talking to one of the waitresses (Celia Aloma) or communicating with his well-meaning bank manager boss Sam (Andrew Wheeler) at work.
Artistic Director Ashlie Corcoran directs the play with a seamless stream of consciousness to Kenneth's thoughts and direct-to-audience monologue explaining his afflictions and journey living in the small town of Cranberry in upstate New York (population of 15,000, mostly white, and forty minutes away from Rochester). It's a spare but affecting assembly of vulnerable performances in front of a generic but multifunctional storefront set with a rotating floor.
A storytelling work of loss, loneliness, and lingering trauma, Primary Trust commits to its sad but challenging material yet never piles on or revels in any misery. It's ultimately an uplifting piece of drama that makes for a real actor's showcase. Booth frames the characters' desire for connection through their anxieties and flaws without ever judging them. There's something special to its comical staging, yearning for friendship, and dark humour.
Primary Trust runs until March 2nd live on the Granville Island Stage.
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