Primary Trust is gentle, funny but a bit bland

Primary Trust by Eboni Booth opened at Crow’s Theatre on Friday night. The protagonist is Kenneth; a thirty eight year old African-American living in a suburb of Rochester, NY. Orphaned at ten, Kenneth has worked in the same second hand bookstore since he was eighteen and spends his leisure time drinking mai tais at Wally’s; a tiki bar. He’s accompanied by his friend Bert; who no-one else can see, who was his social worker in the first days after he was discovered with his dead mother in a kitchen cabinet and then dropped out of his life.

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Summer and Smoke and synchronicity

On one level Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke seems like just another Southern Gothic tale of repressed small town folk with southern accents shouting at other members of their thoroughly dysfunctional families.  There’s plenty of that of course but there’s also a fascinating analysis of how relationships can be made or broken according to, essentially, how individual life arcs align.  This aspect is very clearly brought out in Paolo Santalucia’s production that opened at Crow’s Theatre on Wednesday evening.

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