Primary Trust starts October 5!
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By Thomas Conners
When Eboni Booth was around 10, her mother spotted a notice that Lehman College in New York was about to mount a production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and was holding young performer auditions. She took her daughter to the casting call and Eboni walked away with a part. And that, as poet Robert Frost said, “made all the difference.” Booth went on to attend the arts-centric LaGuardia High School and later graduated from Juilliard’s playwriting program. This past May, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play, Primary Trust. As rehearsals began for the Chicago premiere of this award-winning play, Booth shared a bit about her life in the theater.
Thomas Connors: You began your professional life as an actor. How did you transition to writing?
Eboni: As an actor, I was lucky to be involved in a lot of workshops, readings and new play development. It was really eye-opening to see how playwrights talked about craft, how they put their worlds together, and I learned a lot about the writer-director relationship as an actor. What I was also discovering was that as much I loved acting, it wasn’t quite enough to sustain me. I found it difficult waiting for opportunities to come my way, and it was getting harder for me to work in service of someone else’s vision. A friend of mine encouraged me to try writing my own play. I wrote a play, took a bunch of classes and applied to every program and group and got rejected from them all. But I was so used to rejection as an actor that I didn’t feel too daunted. I just kept going. I kept writing—and applied to Juilliard and got accepted my second time—and that changed my life.
Thomas Connors: You grew up in the Bronx and now live in Queens, but attended the University of Vermont and the New England experience seems to have shaped your work.
Eboni: I have set two plays in fictional towns in the northeast. I find myself creatively and emotionally drawn to the region. The weather, the landscape, the seeming quaintness of life in some of these smaller places—it all comes together in a way that I find intriguing and very mysterious. Sometimes I think that the things that seem furthest from me help me understand life in a larger sense a bit more. I’ve found interesting creative tension by making use of an environment with a very different rhythm than the one I grew up in.
Thomas Connors: Primary Trust is wonderfully specific, so solid in the world it expresses—how did this setting, these people, this presentation of life came to you?
Eboni: One of my favorite parts about writing has been the freedom to write what I love. I’ve been able to string together seemingly disparate threads in my life and try to find some sort of narrative whole. Tiki bars and friendship and financial anxiety and family fracture and the promise of happy hour — these are all obsessions of mine. When I got out of my imagination’s way, the world began to emerge for me.
Thomas Connors: Tell us a little bit about how you portray the main character, Kenneth.
Eboni: Kenneth came to the front of my mind, not fully formed, but some of his defining characteristics were already there. It wasn’t a conscious decision to make Kenneth male. It sounds puffed up, but sometimes characters just kind of present themselves to you. And maybe by keeping him male, it created enough of a distancing effect for me to get into the hard stuff in a way that felt like I still had a little bit of protection.
Thomas Connors: Primary Trust touches on a sense of loss, being untethered, aloneness. Is this a theme you find yourself returning to?
Eboni: Loss and loneliness are central preoccupations of mine. I feel so lucky that writing has become a way to try to grapple with some of these feelings, ones that aren’t necessarily negative, but the risk of being overwhelmed is there. Sometimes I go through the world feeling quite heavy and quiet. My load is lightened through other people—when I can see the big parts of life not just as daunting, but as a reminder that I’m having a complete experience of what it means to be human.
Thomas Connors is a Chicago-based freelance writer and the Chicago Editor of Playbill.
