Primary Trust

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Primary Trust is an arresting character study of an isolated man finding the courage to expand his world and begin again.

38-year-old Kenneth lives a comfortable life of routine in suburban New York: after days spent working at a used bookstore, he whiles away his evenings knocking back mai tais with his best friend Burt at the local tiki bar. But when the long-time bookstore owner decides to close up shop for good, Kenneth panics at the prospect of finding a new job--a process that unearths long-suppressed fears. When Kenneth makes a new friend named Corrina, and she begins to ask questions Kenneth isn’t prepared to answer: how many mai tais is too many mai tais? And who--or what--is Burt? Primary Trust is a deeply affecting play about the careful structures we build to contain oceans of feeling and what happens when those structures begin to crumble.

Eboni Booth is a writer and actor from New York City. Her plays include Primary Trust (Roundabout Theatre, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Outer Critics Circle Award) and Paris (Atlantic Theater). For television, she has written for Hulu’s We Were the Lucky Ones and HBO Max’s Julia.As an actor, she has appeared in productions at Playwrights Horizons, LCT3, Manhattan Theater Club, Ars Nova, WP Theater, Page 73, Soho Rep., Clubbed Thumb, and more. Booth is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, and the recipient of a Dramatists Guild Horton Foote Award, a Steinberg Playwright Award, a Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, and a John Gassner Award. She is a graduate of Juilliard’s playwriting program and the University of Vermont.