The Scholar's Take: Sylvia Onorato on Primary Trust

Written by
Sylvia Onorato
May 27, 2025

Sylvia Onorato attended a performance of Primary Trust at McCarter Theatre on May 14th, 2025. She is a PhD at Princeton in the English Department, and her research explores the connection between literary form and political reform in American prose poetry of the early 1900s. This essay is part of The Scholar’s Take Series.

Sylvia Onorato and Primary Trust

I have a deeply rooted love of the unexpected - as expected, for a scholar studying oxymoronic composite genres. My favorite literature escapes easy classification. So when I had the joy of seeing Primary Trust, a play by Eboni Booth that won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2024, I was excited to discover how it would riff on theatrical and narrative conventions. In a series of delightful twists and turns, it flirts with character archetypes and plot tropes only to dismantle them. At points, it approaches bildungsroman, office drama, and romance, but does not squarely settle on any of them. It also vacillates between immersion and direct address; sometimes we as the audience feel like invisible onlookers, and at other times we are present in the scene. From start to finish, these surprises not only kept me on my toes, but allowed for thorough and engaging exploration of themes like friendship, trauma, acceptance, and resilience. 

In front of a hazy violet skyline, below twinkling stars, a man steps onto the stage. Kenneth, the protagonist, begins the play with a monologue addressed to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. He spoke to us as if we were characters, too. His tone was so earnest I felt as if I were a personal acquaintance of his, and was curious what my role could be in this small town of Cranberry, NY. Already, Booth had inverted the dynamic between the diegetic world of the play and the extradiegetic world of its viewers. Instead of us wondering who the protagonist was, the protagonist had us questioning who we were.

"This," Kenneth tells us in his opening monologue, "is a story about friendship." Right away, he frames the play in terms of a theme-based genre. I believed him wholeheartedly, but at the same time I was certain there would be a twist. After studying American Literature for almost a decade, I've noticed that many of the best, canonically significant works tend to resist easy summary. It would be a story about friendship - and what else? 

I expected there would be an unlikely friendship, but what I did not expect was that Primary Trust would revolutionize friendship as a concept. Prior to viewing the play, I thought of friendship as the result of conscious decisions made by at least two people. I did not know it was possible to befriend a memory - to give it life and agency, and to care for it sincerely. But that is exactly what Kenneth does. 

In a scene I found especially compelling, we come to learn something special about Kenneth's best friend, Bert. They go faithfully to “Wally's,” the oldest tiki hut in the state, for every happy hour. At Wally's, the waitress hawks specials to the audience and the two friends have an increasingly animated conversation as they sip Mai Tais. Everyone's speech is loud and their movements exaggerated, and unlike the beginning, we feel we are watching a play again. But there's a catch. The waitress only serves drinks to Kenneth, not Bert. In a moment with so much emphatic acting, this subtle detail could be very easy to miss. And yet, it's what sets the rest of the play in motion. The waitress does not give Bert a glass because, as Kenneth soon tells us, Bert is invisible. 

Like the black hole at the center of a galaxy, this unique friendship is the present absence around which everything else falls into orbit. When Kenneth gets a new job and meets a kind lady, he does not do so alone. Bert challenges everyone he meets to be better people, by challenging the concept of personhood itself. Further, as a member of the audience, I know that everyone on stage is not a person but a character. Just as Kenneth shares his personhood with an imaginary friend, the other characters likewise carry around alter egos in the form of archetypes. 

By engaging with Bert, the characters confront their own archetypes. This leads to some tense moments and some wholesome ones, but in the end it encourages the viewers to think open-mindedly about all the people they meet, real and imaginary. Primary Trust reminds me why I enjoy genre bending. Nobody is condemned to expectations; there is always room for a potential friendship. 


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.