Portland Center Stage has opened its season with Primary Trust, a show poised for broad audience appeal. 

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Eboni Booth’s play invites audiences into the world of Kenneth, a damaged 38-year-old man who has managed to live quietly under the radar of his small town until events push him a bit more out into the open. 

It’s clear that the play resonates with audiences; its productions have inspired praise in a range of cities. Now PCS aims to boost the appeal of its own production by featuring, as its lead, comedian and actor Larry Owens, who is beloved for his work in theater, film, and television. His recent work includes Problemista and a recurring role on Abbott Elementary.

Owens is on stage for the entire 95-minute run time of Primary Trust, guiding us into Kenneth’s perspective on his world. Kenneth is an unobtrusive bit player in his small town, a fictional suburb of Rochester, New York — but in this play, he is the protagonist. All of the action revolves around him.

It’s quite a shift in focus for an unobtrusive Black man in a small town dominated by white people to be the focal point of the story. Playwright Booth writes from an awareness that Black people exist in many such places where white people don’t register them, at least not clearly. Here Kenneth narrates his own life, which he has spent mostly in a quiet bookstore job that he has held for two decades, and in a local tiki bar where each evening he consumes endless Mai Tais with his best friend, Bert.

Reasons for concern about Kenneth emerge from his own narration — and Owens, practiced at operating on multiple levels, conveys that Kenneth is not entirely unaware of those reasons for concern. He confesses early on that his best friend is invisible to anyone but him. He knows this, and doesn’t find it especially troubling. Bert’s friendship is real to him, and functions as an anchor in the life he has managed to construct. Over the course of the play, we come to realize Bert’s origins in Kenneth’s past trauma. It’s possible to view Bert as a manifestation of resilience that accounts for Kenneth’s survival. 

But the play doesn’t set out to diagnose or explain. It’s not about alcoholism or mental illness. It’s not an examination of race relations in Kenneth’s small town. It’s an invitation to spend some time with this upbeat but suffering man.

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When the bookstore closes early in the play, Kenneth is left with the task of finding a new job. His resolution of that struggle — a shift that expands his group of connections a bit beyond Bert to a kind woman who works at the tiki bar and to his new boss at the Primary Trust Bank — is bumpy, though not as bumpy as he or we, if we are being honest, might expect. We come to understand bits more of how Kenneth lost his primary bases for trust in childhood, and how Bert became his anchor. With kindness, Kenneth is offered and finds ways to accept some new bases for primary trust.

The play’s aims are simple, and they resonate with audiences encouraged by its sense of hope for the power of small acts of friendship. This production benefits from a wonderful set designed by Derek Easton, which subtly captures a sense of scale that Kenneth experiences as monumental but that also contains only the elements he is capable of processing. 

What appears to move audiences (as was evident in the audience I was in, and also in all I read about the play after seeing it) landed for me in a more complicated way. I appreciate the idea of shifting the focus to the sort of character who goes unnoticed, and Owens’s performance keeps Kenneth complex. He is not stupid; although he sees things that aren’t there for others, he is perceiving things that are there, including things that others might miss. 

The other members of the small cast do some heavy lifting in carrying the story; Shareen Jacobs plays a variety of roles, including the range of wait staff at the tiki bar that Kenneth barely distinguishes and the customers he serves at the bank; and Ted Rooney’s roles include Kenneth’s two kindly bosses at the bookstore and the bank. Austin Michael Young conveys Bert as the consistent friend that Kenneth needed and has had to conjure. 

I wished, though, that the play had given all of them more to do. I don’t doubt that small acts of kindness like those offered, pivotally, by Kenneth’s two white bosses, can be powerful; I also think a person in Kenneth’s situation won’t so easily find them. The play doesn’t confront the audience with much of reality; it offers a simplified and kinder sense of Kenneth’s problems and their resolution than I could find satisfying, even while it may not be surprising than others do. 

Indeed, something about one Black woman filling so many utility roles, as Jacobs is called upon to do, struck me as perhaps the most realistic aspect of the play, but not in a way that gives that due attention.  I didn’t catch a justification for conveying this simplified version of reality that satisfied me. 

I wouldn’t want to dissuade anyone, though, from leaving inspired by the importance of simple acts of kindness that treat someone who doesn’t easily fit as one who is also worthy of friendship and investment. Especially if that inspiration includes a commitment to include all that is simple and complex about doing so.

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• Primary Trust continues through Oct. 26 on the Main Stage of Portland Center Stage at The Armory, 128 N.W. 11th Ave., Portland. Ticket and schedule information here.
• Larry Owens, star of Primary Trust, will present Sondheimia, a “curated concert” to benefit Portland Center Stage, at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 20, on the Main Stage at The Armory, 128 N.W. 11th Save., Portland. Tickets for the benefit concert are $100 and $125, with some limited-availability $25 tickets. Ticket and other information here.