SLIGHTLY TOO BIG
FOR HIS WORLD

Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer-winning drama
offers comfort, compassion, and just
enough unease beneath the surface

Petey McGee and Uo Chukwu

A bell rings before the lights come up. Out of the dark rises Cranberry, New York, a fictional suburb of Rochester built at the size of a model train layout: a church, a bowling alley, a bank called Primary Trust, a tiki bar called Wally’s. A guitarist on the apron picks something gentle. Eboni Booth’s play, directed by Knud Adams, asks you to settle into this world for 95 minutes and watch a quiet man come unstuck from his life.

The quiet man is Kenneth, 38, played by Petey McGee. He has worked at the same used bookstore for 20 years. His mother died when he was 10. He has gotten through every day since by ordering Mai Tais at Wally’s with his best friend Bert, who is imaginary—a fact Kenneth tells the audience early and matter-of-factly. Then his boss Sam announces the bookstore is closing. Sam and his wife are moving to Arizona for his health, and Kenneth is out of a job for the first time in his adult life. A new waitress named Corrina tells him about a teller opening at the bank across the street. Kenneth has never applied for a job before. He goes in for the interview.

The play won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Whether it deserved to is the question I want to raise and then set aside.

James Urbaniak, Ugo Chukwu, Petey McGee, and Luke Wygodny

McGee’s hands give Kenneth away before his face does. They hover near the rim of the Mai Tai glass and never quite close around it. He holds himself the way a man holds himself when the room has been a problem for a long time. When Sam tells him about the bookstore, McGee does not crumble. He counts backward under his breath—the trick Booth gives Kenneth for panic—and then he says thank you.

Ugo Chukwu plays Bert as a friend rather than a guardian, and the choice rearranges the play. Bert is closer to Kenneth’s age than expected, more contemporary than parental, and the two men sit at Wally’s like people who came up together. The friendship looks easy and equal, which makes it easier to miss how much weight Kenneth has been asking it to carry.

Rebecca S’manga Frank plays several of Wally’s waitresses, each one distinct enough to register without turning the doubling into a stunt. One walks differently. Another has a slightly different rhythm at the table. Another asks for Kenneth’s drink order with a new shade of professional cheer. The point is not that these women are interchangeable, but that Kenneth keeps encountering versions of the same everyday kindness. As Corrina, Frank does not treat Kenneth like a patient. She speaks to him like a co-worker, which is its own form of dignity.

Rebecca S’Manga Frank and Petey McGee

James Urbaniak doubles as Sam, the bookstore owner, and Clay, the bank manager. The interview scene is the funniest in the production because Urbaniak refuses to make Clay a fool. Clay is a decent man doing an HR job he does not enjoy. Luke Wygodny, the onstage musician who has been with the production since its first run, plays the guitarist at Wally’s and underscores the action throughout. He has the rare instinct of a theatre musician who knows when not to play.

Marsha Ginsberg‘s scaled-down Cranberry, lit by Isabella Byrd in colors borrowed from old postcards, is too tidy to be a real place. That is the point. We are seeing the town the way Kenneth needs to see it. Adams directs the actors at full human scale around this miniature environment, so Kenneth is always slightly too big for his own world. The set is the production’s real argument, and also its confession: Cranberry has been made beautiful on purpose.

Now the prize.

The Pulitzer citation praised Primary Trust as “a simple and elegantly crafted story” about small acts of kindness changing a life and enriching a community. The board was not praising theatrical force so much as a kind of moral comfort: kindness, repair, community, healing. Against the formal and political risks of Here There Are Blueberries and Public Obscenities, Booth’s play was the safest of three serious choices. In 2024, safety had institutional appeal.

Petey McGee

I do not think the prize was a mistake. I do think anyone who watches American drama prizes for years knows that the safest choice usually wins, and expects it will again.

There is more in Booth’s script than the production chooses to press. Kenneth is a Black man moving through a largely white upstate suburb whose institutions are quietly disappearing. The bookstore closes. The bank trains its tellers to upsell customers into products they may not need. Wally’s feels less like a permanent gathering place than a future real-estate opportunity. Booth refuses to dramatize these pressures directly. They move beneath the floorboards while the play stays with small acts of generosity. That is a choice, not an oversight, and it is the choice that makes Primary Trust interesting and somewhat limited at the same time. Booth seems to believe that personal kindness can sustain a person inside systems she cannot change. The question is whether the play believes it too, or whether it is being careful. The production answers yes without hesitation. Kenneth looks slightly too big for his world. The play, finally, does not.

None of which should keep you from the Taper. The play earns its tears before the end, and the small final smile arrives as something Kenneth has worked for, not something the script has handed him. Booth and Adams have made an evening of real gentleness. That matters. Whether gentleness is the highest thing theatre can offer is the question Primary Trust is too courteous—and perhaps too cautious—to ask. My answer is no. My recommendation is still yes.

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photos by Jeff Lorch

Primary Trust
Center Theatre Group
Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. in Los Angeles
95 minutes, no intermission
ends on June 28, 2026
for tickets (starting at $40.25), call 213.628.2772 or visit CTG

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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