Terry Morgan – Arts Beat LA
One never knows where inspiration will strike. Eboni Booth’s play, Primary Trust, is partly set in a tiki bar that is its protagonist’s favorite place on Earth. Although the story is set in New York, Booth mentioned in an interview that her inspiration for that bar was Damon’s, an almost ninety-year-old tropical-themed steakhouse known for their mai-tais, located in Glendale. Not only did this play get a Broadway production, but it also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. It’s a powerfully moving piece about trauma and how community can heal, and CTG’s new production at the Mark Taper Forum is excellent. Read more…
Travis Michael Holder – TicketHoldersLA
In an era where contemporary drama frequently mistakes volume and sprawling high-stakes mechanics for depth, Eboni Booth’s play offers a radical alternative: a quiet, intensely focused, and sublimely tender exploration of loneliness, the comfort and trap of routine, and the seismic bravery required for some people to let the world in. Read more…
Elaine Mura – Splash Magazine
Not much happens in this tale – and yet everything happens too. The audience will just have to dig a bit to see what’s boiling just beneath the surface. PRIMARY TRUST is a fascinating account of loneliness, community, and change. Read more…
Anita W. Harris – LA Theatrix
Eboni Booth’s 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Primary Trust” has good intentions. Its 38-year-old protagonist has suffered lifelong anxiety compounded by childhood trauma, making him immediately sympathetic and a poster child for today’s heightened focus on mental health. Yet the play itself suffers from a sense of incompleteness and disproportion, often relying on telling rather than showing, depicting alcohol as both fun self-medication and a therapeutic device that enables deep sharing — seemingly incongruous with the play’s emphasis on mental health issues and forming healthy friendships — and filling its short run time with incidental comedy rather than story. Read more…
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw
Booth’s writing is filled with wry tender humor, the kind that comes from understanding the lonely human heart and the behaviors of ordinary folk who deal each day with the aches and pains of getting by. Read more…