The Grand Theatre’s “Primary Trust” Finds Grace in Loneliness and Connection – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The London ON Theatre Review: The Grand Theatre’s Primary Trust

By Ross

There is something quietly miraculous about Primary Trust at the Grand Theatre, as it strolls in with such simplicity and care. It’s a production that unfolds with tenderness, humour, and an unshakeable belief in theatre’s most elemental power: the fascinating art of storytelling. It carries with it an honesty and insight, giving the whole production the astute ability to tell a deeply felt story with openness and clarity. Presented in association with Crow’s Theatre, where it will soon travel to in Toronto, this staging of Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play feels both intimate and emotionally expansive, etched with the impulse to understand a person’s lifelong loneliness rather than judge it.

Bells are rung throughout Kenneth’s journey, suggesting restart, correction, possibility, and renewal, yet the play never feels sentimental or overstated. Instead, it resonates with the gentle truth of lived experience. That truth crystallizes early in a quietly devastating scene in which Kenneth is tenderly let go from the small bookstore that has felt most like home, as its gruff but deeply caring owner, played with aching empathy by Ryan Hollyman (Tarragon’s The Hooves Belonged…), struggles, cigarette in hand and health failing, to explain that circumstances, not judgment, are forcing Kenneth back into the world. And it breaks his heart as he takes steps to save his own.

Booth’s writing is a subtle portrait of solitude and survival, of the fragile balance between coping and connection. Kenneth’s world is small, precise, and deeply human, and in Cherissa Richards’s thoughtful direction, it unfolds with unknowing patience and emotional clarity. Kenneth does not simply guide us through his story; he ushers us into it like a kind townsperson inviting us to take a seat next to him in a familiar booth at a neighbourhood Tiki bar. His unadorned narration feels less like a performance than a whispered confession, and the production honours that tone, allowing silence, humour, and hesitation to speak as loudly as dialogue, with small admissions, like Kenneth’s simple, devastating “I’m agitated all the same,” landing with disproportionate emotional force.

Durae McFarlane delivers a performance as Kenneth that is quietly and carefully mesmerizing. Entering with nervous grace, he holds the audience from his first halting attempts to begin his tale. McFarlane (Soulpepper’s The Walk-Up) makes Kenneth’s vulnerability feel both specific and universal, revealing the weight of his loneliness without ever pushing for sympathy. Standing right beside him like a guardian angel is Bert, played with warmth and subtle complexity by Peter N. Bailey (Stratford’s An Ideal Husband). Their caring relationship becomes the play’s most haunting emotional thread, a coping mechanism that gradually reveals its deeper cost. And then we have the arrival of Corrina, played with luminous empathy by Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah (Stratford’s Something Rotten!). She is a waitress whose open-heartedness feels both comforting and destabilizing for Kenneth, filling her scenes with McFarlane with gentle comedy and aching possibility. Growth is coming, whether Kenneth is ready or not, and Corrina, and others, will be close by, ready to lend support with a hug or a handshake, but it will be up to Kenneth, and Kenneth alone, to do the required work.

The rest of the cast enriches this framing and structure within this small-town ecosystem with texture and wit. Hollyman shifts effortlessly between roles, finding humour and a quiet humanity in each figure he embodies, especially the former quarterback-turned-bank manager who offers Kenneth a tentative chance at change and salvation. The hypnotic Lawrence Libor (Shaw’s One Man, Two Guvnors), as the background tiki bar pianist, provides a compelling musical presence that hovers at the edges of Kenneth’s world, drawing us in with his live performance, which casts a subtle and surprising spell over the evening. Each actor feels like an essential part of a carefully calibrated emotional landscape rather than a collection of individual performances, and it fills the stage with a warmth that is both captivating and careful.

Visually, the production is both clever and evocative. The set by Julie Fox (Soulpepper’s The Welkin) moves fluidly through Kenneth’s memories and present moments, while Rachel Forbes’s costumes, Imogen Wilson’s lighting, and Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design quietly support the play’s shifts between realism and the carefully constructed imagination. The world that emerges feels familiar yet slightly tilted, grounded yet touched by surreal possibility, and in this balance between the ordinary and the extraordinary, Primary Trust finds its emotional power.

Primary Trust at the Grand Theatre feels like more than just a successful production. It feels like an invitation to engage and care about another human being, even if he isn’t exactly remarkable from first glance. Booth’s play restores our faith in storytelling not through spectacle but through sincerity, humour, and compassion. Kenneth’s journey is not one of dramatic maternal big-hat transformation but of fragile, incremental change and a nervous trust in self, the kind that dares only to imagine that things might be different, that they might improve. And we see that growth as Kenneth quietly allows himself to ponder an idea and a shift in thinking, now “that would be something.” In that restraint lies this play’s profound beauty. And by the time the story closes, the audience has not merely watched Kenneth, but we have sat beside him, listened to him, and had a sweet Mai Tai with him in his corner booth, quietly recognizing something of ourselves in his sadness, quiet solitude, and his hope.