Primary Trust

Play (2024)
by Eboni Booth
Directed by Dawn M. Simmons
Speakeasy Stage Company
Boston Center for the Arts
South End, Boston
September 12 – October 11, 2025

Scenic Designer: Shelley Barish; Lighting Designer: Karen Perlow; Costume Designer: Chelsea Kerl; Sound Desinger: Anna Drummond

With David J. Castillo (Kenneth), Arthur Gomez (Bert), Janelle Grace (Corrina, Wally’s Waiter, Bank Customers), Luis Negrón (Clay, Sam, Le Pousselet Bartender)

David J. Castillo as Kenneth, Janelle Grace as Corinna in 'Primary Trust' — David J. Castillo as Kenneth
Janelle Grace as Corinna
in “Primary Trust”
Photo: Benjamin Rose Photography
Courtesy of Speakeasy Stage Company

A heartfelt drama about a man who suffers a childhood loss and has challenges finding significant connections in the real world.

Kenneth (David J. Castillo) lives in a little town in upstate New York and has a job at a bookstore where he works for a nice boss named Sam (Luis Negrón). He’s in his thirties and spends much of his time, when not working, at a favorite Tiki bar with his friend Bert (Arthur Gomez), a wonderfully caring and attentive guy. Ken and Bert drink Mai Tai cocktails in some profusion, but at one point it becomes clear that Bert is not what he seems. (For more detail, see the spoilers section below.) Kenneth’s mother died when he was ten and there was a social worker named Bert who had significant impact on Ken’s life and Kenneth has borne that loss and that poignant memory of the tender support he received at the time for many years. Now, at the Tiki bar, Kenneth meets a waitress named Corrina (Janelle Grace) with whom he gets particularly friendly. Kenneth’s work, one of the few real anchors in his life, also undergoes some changes, unsettling indeed. Yet, after having a long and devoted relationship with his employer at the bookstore, he winds up getting a job as a teller at a bank and dealing with a bank manager named Clay (Luis Negrón) who also demonstrates significantly humane qualities at a critical time.

This lovely little play is a meditation on friendship and how hard it can be to win it and keep it. Kenneth lives in a circumscribed world and derives a good deal from his closest friend, Bert, but there are some issues that need to be addressed. How Kenneth relates to the world at large beyond his Mai Tai counterpart, and how he begins to develop trust in others, is at the root of this narrative. The premise is relatively simple and straightforward, but this earnest and well-meaning production does a good job of underscoring and driving home the important points. One realizes, as one emerges from this performance, how subtle and delicate human relationship is, and how important seemingly tangential friendships and other human connections can ultimately become.

As Kenneth, David J. Castillo does a fine job of showing a vulnerable, isolated, but endearing character as both genuinely available and tragically self-contained. He does a great job of conveying Kenneth’s innocence and his something difficult to manage rages. Castillo bears vulnerability in a guise of innocence and naivete and allows the deeper caverns of his complex character to peer, and ultimately, bleed, through in a convincing way.

As the ontologically challenged Bert, Arthur Gomez offers a jolly, likeable, supportive and completely affable rendition, with an account that gives a wonderful sense of what a friend can be.

As bank manager Clay, Luis Negrón gives a serious and heartfelt account of a regular guy who has a strong streak of decency. He calling back to days as a renowned college football player makes one realize that even college football heroes have a past which carries forward with them, sometimes as an echo of what might have portended greater greatness than what became. He also does a nice job in the different benevolent role of Sam, Kenneth’s bookstore boss.

In a myriad of roles, too numerous to count, Janelle Grace brings a passel of accents and demeanors to the forefront, often with considerable humor. But she also has the significant role of Corrina, Kenneth’s confidante, and she puts that one in a special frame with a heart around it. It’s a lovely performance among many other interesting and varied ones. Grace has the capacity to convey a wide range of personas, usually with considerable distinctiveness, but all conforming to the range of characters of a particular class and disposition who might show up as bartenders or wait staff at a Tiki bar, not an easy task.

The production overall is well done with a couple of minor issues. There is a bell that is rung repeatedly to signal mode or scene changes; it’s understandable what the function is, but its frequency is a bit disconcerting. There is also very quiet music that emerges when Kenneth and Bert are at the Tiki bar, but it is so faint that it seems at first that it might be from the theater next door. Certainly neither is a significant detraction from the well acted and emotionally persuasive production.

Overall: A charming and heartfelt tribute to friendship and its importance for the cultivation of sanity.

Extra info: contains spoilers

The gotcha of this clever and touching narrative is that Bert, Kenneth’s best and devoted friend, is imaginary. At the heart of this touching drama is the idea that in a state of deprivation and trauma the human mind seeks all kinds of alternative routes to adapt. In this case, Kenneth’s cultivation of an imaginary friend does not particularly alter his capacity to act within the world at large as would be the case with a full-fledged schizophrenic for whom the power to deal with the real world is extremely limited. Here, Kenneth compartmentalizes his imaginary friendship into its own special space and nobody in the realm of Kenneth’s ordinary involvements – such as his boss at the bookstore, Sam – really knows that Kenneth is operating with an alternative reality.

The drama of the play then becomes Kenneth’s capacity to find in the real world a substitute for what he has found with Bert in the imaginary realm. The suggestion is that real and very positive connections with Corrina and with Clay make this possible. It’s not entirely clear from the narrative why Kenneth’s long-term association with Sam has not led earlier on to Kenneth’s greater accommodation of the real world, but one takes this with a grain of salt in getting the main point of the narrative – that it takes a long time and a good deal of support to help mentally ill and traumatized people to feel secure enough to trust their surroundings and the people who inhabit their real lives.

When Kenneth freaks out at a customer at his new banking job, his boss Clay, instead of firing him, shows enormous compassion, and, after giving Kenneth a little time away from the teller-window, retains him and shows the kind of understanding and support that one wishes from all bosses. That capacity to absorb Kenneth’s anger – clearly a manifestation of Kenneth’s squashed inner life – Clay reassures Kenneth that the real world can indeed not be such a bad place after all. That all of the characters in this charming drama are black adds an interesting social dimension to its psychological import, though its persuasive psychological life lessons certainly apply to all.

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)

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