The Pulitzer Prize Board doesn’t always get it right but they most definitely did in 2024 when they opted for hope, healing, and heart over heavy-handedness in honoring Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust, now getting a much anticipated Los Angeles Premiere at the Mark Taper Forum, with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

“This is the story of a friendship. Of how I got a new job. A story of love and balance and time. And the smallest of chances.”

The person telling us this is Kenneth (Petey McGee), 38 years old and a resident of Cranberry, New York, a suburb about 40 miles east of Rochester.

It’s a town not all that different from Thornton Wilder’s Grover’s Corners though there probably wasn’t a newly opened wine shop just across from the train station in Our Town.

It’s also home to Kenneth’s absolute favorite place on earth, restaurant/watering hole Wally’s, where our hero/narrator heads after his day of work at the local book store to sip Mai Tais with Bert (Ugo Chukwu), his best friend in the whole wide world,

  And though it might seem a bit of a spoiler to reveal this so early on in a review, Kenneth himself informs us within the first few minutes of Primary Trust that Bert is imaginary.

Not that this makes him any less real as far as Kenneth is concerned. (He most definitely has arms and legs, and more importantly, he also has a heart, a good heart, Kenneth informs us.)

As to how, when and why Imaginary Bert became Kenneth’s best and only friend in the world, that’s something you will discover as the many wonders Primary Trust has in store for you unfold before your eyes.

What neither Kenneth nor Bert knows (but are about to find out) is that Sam (James Urbaniak), the owner of the bookshop Kenneth’s been working at since he turned eighteen, has sold the business, hardly welcome news to someone who’s never worked anywhere else his entire adult life.

Playwright Booth, who is African American, as are Kenneth, Bert, and comely Wally’s waitress Corrina (Rebecca S’manga Frank), eschews issues of systemic racism, police violence, and historical trauma for something more universal, our shared humanity, and the possibility of better things ahead, and the result is a play that took me thoroughly by surprise, then kept me laughing (sometimes through tears) as I remained glued to the edge of my seat hoping and praying for things not to go south for a man I found myself caring about from the get-go.

Helming Primary Trust for Center Theatre Group is its original off-Broadway director Knud Adams, and since no one probably knows Kenneth, Bert, Corinna and the rest of Booth’s characters any better than he and the playwright, it’s no wonder Adams’s direction is as flawless as the performances he has elicited on the Taper stage.

The downside of bringing Adams on board is that Los Angeles’s wealth of talent has gotten passed over in favor of an almost entirely New York-based cast, and to be honest, since this is neither a co-production or a national tour or a presented production like English (the Adams-directed Pulitzer Prize winner recently seen at the Wallis), L.A. talent deserved better from CTG.

On the plus side, the remarkable McGee gives one of the year’s most touching, deeply-felt, and downright gorgeous performances as Kenneth, and when you add to that the work being done by Chukwu as the best imaginary friend anyone could ever hope for, Frank as not only the absolutely lovely Corinna but a plethora of her fellow Wally’s servers, and Urbaniak as two very different but equally amazing bosses, you’ve got the most impeccable of ensembles.

The live musical underscoring provided by composer-pianist-guitarist-cellist Luke Wygodny only adds to the Primary Trust magic as does the play’s original New York scenic design by Marsha Ginsberg with its Cranberry buildings in miniature, costumes designed by Sophia Choi, Masha Tsimring’s lighting design, and sound design by Mikkal Sulaiman.

Casting is by Henry Russell Bergstein, CSA. Destiny Faith, Wendell Jordan, Mark Rowe, Dustin Stern-Garcia, and Jordan Temple are understudies.

David Lober is production stage manager and Michelle Blair is stage manager.

It doesn’t happen every day that that a play moves me as deeply as Primary Trust. Casting caveats aside, I advise you to run, not walk to the Mark Taper Forum to catch this most extraordinary of Pulitzer Prize honorees.

Mark Taper Forum, 35 N. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. Through June 28. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 7:30. Fridays at 8:00. Saturdays at 2:00 and 8:00. Sundays at 1:00 and 7:000.
www.centertheatregroup.org

–Steven Stanley
May 28, 2026
Photos: Knud Adams

Visit www.theatreinla.com/nowplayingrs.php for a review roundup of what’s now playing in theaters around Los Angeles.

Tags: Center Theatre Group, Eboni Booth, Los Angeles Theater Review, Mark Taper Forum