Some of the simplest yet greatest problems posed by art pertain to why and how it is that we as humans respond to it. Why do we care about colours, shapes, sounds, or stories? Why does the story of the life of a man who is not real move us to deliciously rich feelings, and why is the way that the story is told so crucial to the success of our being moved in the first place? Why, when I watched the play Primary Trust, could I both notice that layers of carefully-lit fabric hung at the back of the McCarter stage, creating a cityscape, and feel, in my gut, that I was in the middle of Cranberry, NY – a place I have never been? How could I note that Lilian Oben was multi-roling as a range of different characters, and feel I had met someone just like each of them: the overly sunny server, the down to earth employee, the knock-kneed teen working their first job? How do we hold together the fictitiousness of art, and the authenticity of its effects on us? 

What was so special about Primary Trust was that, despite (or perhaps because of) the simplicity of its plot, it aimed at some similarly enormous questions about the problems of emotional communication – albeit not in art, but in life. Not much happens throughout the play: a man goes to a bar, gets a new job, goes to dinner with a woman he likes. And yet, we come to learn about a whole, deeply moving life, and the paroxysms of complicated grief.

The play began as it ended: with its central character, Kenneth, directly addressing us. This, we learnt, was to be the story of his life. In a sense, then, for the entire show, we, the audience, were living in Kenneth’s memory. It turned out that this was particularly apt, since a major theme of the play was to consider the ordinary life of a man who has a harrowing past, and how a person might handle such memories. Primary Trust asks you to notice how such difficulties continue to shape the rest of one’s life. The play builds towards this weight; we learn of the difficulties before the reason for them. To begin with, we are met with Kenneth in a booth – centre stage – with his best friend Bert, and familiar music playing. Kenneth works at a bookstore, and he drinks with his friend in Wally’s tiki bar every night. At this point, early in the play, I was wondering whether there were going to be themes of alcoholism. It would have made the audience rather sheepish if that were the case, since the theatre bar had been decked out for the occasion – fashioned into a tiki bar. And, since most of us had walked through the bar to reach our seats, many of us were clutching cocktails. Was this to be a twisted reflection on us?

It emerged that Kenneth does drink every night, but that’s not the focal point of the play; rather, his frequent drinking at Wally’s is designed to make us realise that he is a person who is desperately lacking social connection, but who is almost unable to vary his lonely routine, since that routine – nights with Bert – is what makes him feel safe. It also emerges that Bert is not, in fact, real. He is real to Kenneth, as Kenneth rushes to tell us, but he is, in fact, a figment of his imagination. All this forms major conflicts for Kenneth when he meets and slowly falls for Corrina, a new server at Wally’s. But any development in their relationship is delayed when Kenneth has to seek out a new job. Managing to restrain himself from talking to Bert too much during his interview, Kenneth scores a position at the bank. This is a major victory, and he goes on to excel at his job, but his life, otherwise, remains the same. Eventually, he runs into Corrina on the street. She has a boyfriend, but they decide to go for a friendly dinner. She is caring, and genuinely pleased to see him. Kenneth finally opens up – for the first time in his life – about the event which shaped his childhood: the death of his mother, and the lack of support he received afterwards. Bert was the social worker who found Kenneth with the corpse of his mother in their home. And, after he had delivered Bert into care, he was the man who didn’t come back, though he had promised to. And so, Kenneth changed the narrative. And kept changing it. Until his life revolved around the fiction that was his friendship with Bert – a friendship which apparently had no beginning and no end. And that was why he could not handle change, until he was forced to.

On the one hand, then, Primary Trust is a story about trauma response, and the slow road towards a better life. On the other, it reminds us that fiction keeps us going: speaking to and salving feelings when there seems to be no other way to express them, and no one else to tell. For many people, this is contained – we live in it for the space of a book, or a play, or a movie – but for Kenneth, it had both consumed and continued his life, entangling with it. Bert was his strength and his undoing, allowing him to go on, but never to change. Because if anything in his life changed, he would have to acknowledge that there were beginnings and endings, and then he would have to think about how his relationship with Bert began. When it emerges that evenings with Bert were never actions, but only stories, Primary Trust begins to challenge the binary I posed in my initial questions. Insofar as Bert is a fiction – and one into which the audience bought, at first, believing Bert was a real character – the play seems to ask, where does art end, and life begin?

These are the things which Primary Trust was about, for me. The beauty, of course, is that these impressions of mine about what the play meant are true, but also might be quite different forsomeone else. A different audience member might have seen a play more about a specific trauma response than about themes of representation and communication. How much lived experience changes within each of our memories! The play itself becomes a thousand different stories which live as vivid as life in our minds, after our shared experience of it. Seen in this light, Primary Trust is each audience member’s own Bert: existing in our memories as an array of different, lasting narratives, all after the single event that was.

The Scholar’s Take is a series of essays by Princeton students in response to experiences at McCarter. It is part of Arts & Ideas which connects University scholarship and campus life to the work on our stage. Co-sponsored by the Princeton University Humanities Council.