The Los Angeles premiere of “Primary Trust” arrived not with spectacle, but with something closer to a soft hello: unhurried, unguarded, and all the more disarming for it. Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, presented by Center Theatre Group and directed by Knud Adams, asks almost nothing of an audience except its attention, and then repays that attention with something increasingly rare on a large stage: tenderness offered without apology.

Many in the Taper will arrive already knowing the play’s reputation. It premiered Off-Broadway at Roundabout Theatre Company in 2023, was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick, and won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Adams, who shepherded the original production and later staged its West Coast premiere at La Jolla Playhouse, returns here with a newly cast ensemble and the same gift for locating enormity in the small. What he understands, and what this staging trusts completely, is that a life lived quietly is still a life worthy of our full attention.

“In its unassuming way, Primary Trust is one of the most moving things on an L.A. stage this season.”

The story could hardly be plainer. Kenneth, thirty-eight, has spent twenty years working at a used bookstore in the fictional town of Cranberry, New York, a place whose civic motto, “Welcome, friend. You’re right on time!”, doubles as the play’s quiet moral philosophy. His evenings belong to Wally’s tiki bar, to two-for-one mai tais, and to Bert, the best friend only Kenneth, and we, can see. When the bookstore abruptly closes, Kenneth is pushed beyond the edges of a world he has spent decades carefully shrinking to fit. There is no villain here, no betrayal, scarcely a raised voice. The drama is entirely interior: the terror of being seen, the slow labor of trust, and Booth renders it all with a delicacy that never tips into sentimentality.

Marsha Ginsberg’s scenic design conjures Cranberry as a kind of inhabited model town, its little storefronts glowing at a remove like memories you could almost step back into, the warm amber glow of the Primary Trust bank presiding over it all. Masha Tsimring’s lighting moves to the rhythm of Kenneth’s inner weather, brightening and dimming as he reaches toward people or retreats from them; at one point it sends a slow fall of snow drifting over the little town, backlit by a soft, radiant glow, a hushed, luminous image among the production’s most beautiful. Throughout, Luke Wygodny underscores the play live from the edge of the stage, moving between piano, cello, and guitar, and marking each shift in time with a small bell that seems to reset Kenneth whenever the world becomes too loud. In the Taper’s intimate half-round, where no seat sits far from the action, the effect is less like watching a play than being quietly let in on one.

The production rests, as it must, on its Kenneth, and Petey McGee carries it with a watchful stillness that makes each emotional opening feel hard-won and fully earned. He lets us see the effort behind ordinary courage. Ugo Chukwu’s Bert is warm, funny, and quietly heartbreaking, a companion so fully imagined that you briefly forget he is imagined at all. Rebecca S’Manga Frank and James Urbaniak, both returning from the La Jolla staging, are marvels of quick-change generosity, summoning an entire town of waiters, bosses, and bank customers between them. Urbaniak, in particular, finds both comedy and kindness in nearly every soul Kenneth encounters, while Frank’s Corinna becomes the warm, insistent hand that keeps drawing him outward.

The play’s emotional center is not a grand revelation, but a quiet act of relinquishment: the moment Kenneth must loosen his grip on Bert, the invisible friend who has been both lifeline and cage. For a man who has built an entire life around the safety of not being fully known, letting that comfort go becomes the bravest thing he can do, and it lands with devastating force precisely because it arrives so softly. What we witness is simply a man deciding, at last, to step into a life he can no longer keep at arm’s length. In its unassuming way, “Primary Trust” is one of the most moving things on an L.A. stage this season.

— Sachin Bhatt

Primary Trust runs through June 28, 2026, at the Mark Taper Forum. For more information, visit http://www.centertheatregroup.org.