STAGE WEST: "Primary Trust" at La Jolla Playhouse

Caleb Eberhardt (left) and James Udom in "Primary Trust."                                   Photo by Rich Soublet II

            “Primary Trust” is a quiet play. So quiet that on opening night its silences made audible the squeak of patrons shifting in their seats inside La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Forum Theatre. So quiet that I couldn’t help but hear the woman sitting next to me sniffling and stifling sobs as the contemplative tale wound toward its denouement.
            Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a beautiful piece of writing that just in places translates to compelling live theater. Its protagonist Kenneth, a sensitive but (as we will learn) broken man residing in his thoughts, comes alive only when he’s at his regular hangout, Wally’s, a neighborhood tiki bar. There, he downs Mai Tai’s and converses with his friend Bert – who no one else can see. The rest of the time it’s sssh! Kenneth is in his head. Do not disturb.
            This makes for very slow going.
           There is a story here. Kenneth (Caleb Eberhardt) of fictitious Cranberry, N.Y. loses the job he’s toiled away at (presumably in quiet) for 20 years in service of the chain-smoking owner of a bookstore. That is but half of Kenneth’s life, the other being his perpetual happy hours spent with Bert (James Udom, whom we can see) and all the Mai Tai’s at Wally’s. When a server there, Corrina (Rebecca S’manga Frank), befriends the out-of-work Kenneth, she affably steers him toward a possible opening at the town’s Primary Trust bank. In spite of a mightily awkward interview there with the bank boss Clay (James Urbaniak), Kenneth is hired and his “new life” begins.
            Sort of.
            As the bank teller job and the growing platonic friendship with Corrina inch Kenneth somewhat out of his shell, the presence of Bert – his buddy, his confidante, his conscience, his source of calm and succor – begins to lessen.
            Kenneth, who discovers humbly that he’s good at bank telling, is entering the world. The question Booth poses is: Does he really wish to?
            I’m not certain this question is truly answered. “Primary Trust” in its soft, deliberate way takes us to the point of Kenneth’s reckoning, to the self-determination we want for him, but no further.
            Knud Adams, who directed “Primary Trust” in its Roundabout Theatre Company Off-Broadway premiere last year, directs again at the Playhouse. I’m sure he’s true to Booth’s script, but the pace of this production is much too slow for me. A character study such as this naturally can be more inward, more measured in its evolution, but “Primary Trust” demands keen and patient attention from the audience, and faith that it’s headed somewhere fruitful.
            The bell recurringly rung by musician Luke Wygodny onstage, perhaps to suggest that we are going in and out of, or out and in of, Kenneth’s head, feels like a contrivance. No quarrel otherwise with his nearly muted musical accompaniment.
            I will say this: Eberhardt’s is an expressive, deep-toned voice that pierces the silences of “Primary Trust” sublimely. It’s most effective midway through the 95 minutes when he ascends the steps up into the Forum audience for a revealing monologue. By necessity he’s required to reveal, often without even speaking; this is best accomplished during an awkward (though sweet) scene with Corrina over martinis at a swank boite – undoubtedly the only swank boite in Cranberry.
            Urbaniak is given the play’s one openly comedic moment at that boite as a waiter cautiously delivering the martinis as if he’s carrying glasses of nitroglycerin.
            For her part, Frank must morph instantly from one server at Wally’s to another when not playing the kind and sympathetic Corrina. She also gets to incite Kenneth’s one uncharacteristic lapse in interiority when portraying a cranky customer at the teller’s window.
            The set by Marsha Ginsburg reflects in miniature scale the buildings of little Cranberry and accentuates the very smallness of the world Kenneth occupies, a world from which he’s never traveled.
            This aside, the most telling prop of “Primary Trust” is the ubiquitous Mai Tai. It has been Kenneth’s comfort, his life’s routine, his conduit to Bert. Its exotic floral presentation, its party-down connotations are everything Kenneth is not.
            But Kenneth isn’t as alone as he thinks he is. That could be what Booth has to say for all of us during those times when even our most sanguine selves feel like retreating deep inside or escaping into a Mai Tai world.
            “Primary Trust” runs through Oct. 20 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Forum Theatre.