How the Grand Theatre’s Primary Trust makes a tiki bar feel like home

A bar is a witness space. A place where people come to be seen without explanation.  

Vodka water splash of iced tea, no straw, no fruit. 
Club soda, tall glass, lime.
4est lager, cold. 

There is an undeniable bond between artists of all kinds and the food service industry. The struggle-job, the side-gig: It’s how we keep going. And it’s why so many stages, screens, and canvases reflect kitchens, bars, and late-night diners. Spaces where people gather, and tell the truth when they think no one is listening. 

This month, I had the pleasure of introducing someone new to a place that feels something like home: the London, Ontario bar where I’ve worked for the last two years. Dora Award-winning director Cherissa Richards — who, like me, has a decade-long relationship with the restaurant service industry — is in London to direct Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust, playing at the Grand Theatre (in a co-production with Crow’s Theatre). The walls donned the familiar agglomerate of retro movie posters and eccentric pop-art, and the cocktails were fire (no, literally, one was on fire). This no doubt helped shape the passionate, unapologetic conversation that unfurled. 

Let’s get one thing straight: Primary Trust isn’t about working in bars. But it honours bars as spaces we return to — where we go to feel safe. 

Inside the world of Primary Trust, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for drama, there’s a bar called Wally’s. “It lands us. It anchors us into the play,” Richards said.

It anchors the audience, but more importantly, it anchors the protagonist, Kenneth. To a bartender, Kenneth’s relationship to Wally’s is immediately clear. He’s a regular. He’s Mai-Tai-Guy. He’s the guy who sits in the corner and talks to himself. He belongs there, and he is cared for. 

But what I find to be the more interesting question isn’t who Kenneth is to Wally’s — it’s what Wally’s is to Kenneth. 

Richards’ very own Wally’s was a longstanding fine-dining restaurant in Toronto, where she worked on and off between theatre contracts for years. “I really felt at home [there],” she said. “That decade of my life had a real imprint on me.” 

An imprint. Spaces aren’t permanent, but they mark us. And sometimes, the mosaic of all those imprints feels something like home. This is a principle that Primary Trust lays out during Kenneth’s first monologue: “Fifteen years from now, most of that land will be cleared and covered in pavement and new condominiums, but for right now, it feels like some version of home.”

That “right now” is doing a lot of work. Kenneth, as a child, grew up in an orphanage, and was cared for by social workers and bookstore owners deep into his adulthood. Where Kenneth lacked some version of home, he found one in Wally’s. 

The relationship between Wally’s and Kenneth is not uncomplicated. Kenneth is gentle, empathetic, and, as Richards put it, “a beautiful weirdo.” She shared that the actor portraying him, Durae McFarlane, “has that quality for free.

“He’s bringing his full self to the part, and it’s exciting to see how he interprets the material and the character. And we can’t help but fall in love with him.” 

But Wally’s, Kenneth’s safety net in a world that is not built for him, may also be the thing keeping him stuck in place. “Wally’s is a crutch,” Richards emphasized, calling it Kenneth’s “coping mechanism to deal with life without dealing with it.” 

That tension between stillness and progress is what allows Primary Trust to dig into the effects of a life unmoored on one’s mental health. Kenneth’s task at hand: How to survive the world without fully participating in it. 

Kenneth is an isolated character. He lives in the margins, in routines. “He comes out of his isolation to face the world,” said Richards. Booth wrote the play during the pandemic while at Juilliard, and you can feel the isolation in the writing, and the longing for connection beneath it. 

“His character is broken,” Richards said. “He’s stuck in his trauma… and yet he makes baby steps throughout the play. And we’re on the edge of our seats with whether he’s going to succeed, or fail.” 

The specifics of Kenneth’s trauma are something audiences will learn themselves. But according to Richards, Primary Trust’s way of handling that trauma is rare. “Mental health is not a topic that is often discussed in Black communities,” Richards said. “It’s a bit of a taboo issue. So to see it examined with a Black male character is really beautiful.” 

When I first read Primary Trust, it held me for an entire afternoon — no stopping, just turning pages. It had genuinely been a while since a piece of drama, in its raw written form, had this effect on me. I didn’t feel I was being tested on some deep understanding of theatrical fluency. I felt welcomed. I felt pulled in without effort. And Primary Trust’s simplicity is its strength: not because it is easy, but because it meets you exactly where you are. 

Though the play is set in a small fictional suburb of Rochester, New York, Richards believes audiences in London and Toronto will see themselves in it.

“They’ll just recognise themselves, and they’ll recognise their town,” she said. 

London will leave its imprint on this production, just as Wally’s leaves its imprint on Kenneth. Richards, who’s worked twice at the Grand before, described the city as “a perfect place to do this play” — a downtown of stark contrasts, where “pockets of beauty” sit beside “pockets of sadness” and where the “forgottenness” of certain streets feels impossible to ignore. It’s the same emotional landscape Kenneth moves through in Primary Trust: a town with tenderness and hardness living side by side. “It’s impossible not to have the remnants and the qualities of where this piece of art is being born,” Richards said — and in London, those remnants include the good, the grit, and the closeness of it all. Those imprints will travel with the show when it transfers to Toronto, shaped in part by the community that first witnessed it. 

A theatre is a witness space. 

So, you’ve been invited out.

And while you’re out, you’re invited not to sit back, but to lean forward. “Engage with the material,” Richards said. “Cry, scream, yell, laugh, feel.” 

Much like you would at a busy bar, surrounded by strangers.

Primary Trust runs at the Grand Theatre until February 7. More information about the London run is available here. The production will then play Crow’s Theatre in Toronto from May 26 to June 21.

Alexandrea Marsh wrote this feature as part of ON Criticism: The 2025/26 Theatre Critics Lab, a collaboration between the Grand Theatre, Talk is Free Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, Theatre Aquarius, and Intermission.

WRITTEN BY

Alexandrea Marsh

Alexandrea Marsh is a London, Ontario-based artist with a background in multi-media marketing, theatre performance, and bartending. Their perspectives are shaped by both local and international theatrical training, and an enduring passion for literary criticism. A lifelong learner (with a healthy fear of becoming the world’s biggest know-it-all), she spends her days (and nights) at the Palace Theatre across marketing, administration, facilities, and community outreach to champion the local arts scene.

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