Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust is the story of a man in need of compassion with no easy way to ask for it. With arresting theatricality, the play uses light humor to show the main character’s isolation from others while slowly clarifying the depth of what damaged him. In Vermont Stage’s assured production, tragedy and comedy mesh in a portrait of a troubled man, guiding us to look instead of looking away.

Booth graduated from the University of Vermont and went on to attend the Juilliard School’s playwriting program. Primary Trust won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The writing is filled with funny observation devoted to a tender appraisal of the unusual and affecting character Kenneth. The conflicts are small, but the stakes are emotionally big.

The play’s structure is stylishly compact. Quirky details fill the text, so that a story told in 90 minutes is still saturated with emotional weight. In brief monologues that bookend action, Kenneth directly addresses the audience to share his thoughts. The play covers about two months of big changes in his previously routine life, enacted in many short scenes.

Wearing a bright plaid shirt buttoned up to the neck, Kenneth enters to introduce the play, himself and the small fictional town of Cranberry, N.Y. He’s nervous. He interrupts himself to start over. Actually, a small ding from an egg timer interrupts, a signal that we learn indicates a slight slippage of Kenneth’s awareness of time itself. Events repeat or elongate to include exaggerations that may or may not have actually happened. The jittery repetitions give us a chance to perceive as Kenneth does. It’s a jagged world, and memory doesn’t smooth out his experiences.

The anxious figure onstage keeps trying to share his story, an effort that draws the audience’s sympathy and concern. And our laughs, because Kenneth’s odd perspective is intriguing. He’s got a sad childhood, but he seems to have overcome losing his mother at age 10 and growing up in an orphanage.

Ever since, he’s sought a reclusive, repetitive life. He’s worked in the same used-book store for the same fatherly owner for 20 years, and he spends each evening at the same bar drinking happy-hour mai tais with the same best friend, Bert. Patterns help him cope, but they don’t help him make more friends. Only Bert can help Kenneth squelch his anxiety.

When the bookstore owner has to sell his shop, Kenneth’s life must change. That’s when he reveals that Bert is imaginary. He has invented the person he needs, and he needs him more than ever.

As solitary as Kenneth is, he is quite good with people, as a potential employer would like. He’s smart and skilled at surface interactions, which suits a job as a bank teller at Primary Trust. The bank manager takes a chance on him. The script contrasts the hollow language of customer service with Kenneth’s confessional narration to show how empty, and how full, words can be.

Director Jammie Patton uses space, sound and light to convey Kenneth’s perceptions. The set consists of almost life-size black-and-white photos of the streets of a small town. Desks and tables are black and white, as well, and flattened into two dimensions. These stylizations convey Kenneth’s sense of the world as facts without the living pulse of color or shape.

But he does see one place in full. Wally’s Tiki Bar is Kenneth’s haven, and its jauntily lighted bar, gaudy thatched roof, bright tablecloths and soothing yacht rock are all as realistic as can be. Here he can conjure Bert.

With a single major character and no intermission, Primary Trust places the demands of a one-man show on Delanté Keys, playing Kenneth. Keys glides lightly between withdrawal (into safety but also near-psychosis) and expansiveness (toward connections but also misunderstandings). He conveys unease with a stiffness that runs through every muscle, then softens into loose relief upon seeing Bert. Kenneth is comically unselfconscious. His words may take all the strength he has, but when he laughs, he draws happiness from a very deep well.

Two actors play multiple characters, another expression of Kenneth’s imprecise perceptions. Natalie Jacobs portrays the many different waiters at Wally’s. The staff may blur to Kenneth, but they’re distinct onstage, as Jacobs utters Wally’s welcome speech in accents warm or cool, Jamaican or mumbled, musical or toneless. One waitress, Corinna, connects with Kenneth and opens a little more of the world to him.

Mark Roberts plays two fatherly men taking an interest in Kenneth, plus one stuffy waiter taking no interest in anyone. Roberts fills these simple portraits with sharp details, such as letting a stiff drink startle him or puzzling a bit when an obviously troubled Kenneth is too distant to help.

Bert, the imaginary friend, is made beautifully real by Donathan Walters. His voice and manner exude the calm of a soothing waterfall. With a warm smile and a cap spun backward, Walters makes Bert the best of best friends, breaking into silly jokes or gently signaling to Kenneth how to respond to anxious moments. In a rapid montage of drinking scenes, Walters and Keys hilariously flash from emotion to emotion in a dizzy bit of revelry.

Vermont Stage’s fine production values begin with expressive costumes from Sarah Sophia Lidz. Jamien Forrest’s effective lighting marks almost every beat of the show, especially Kenneth’s memory variations, often rendered as big color soaking the sky above set designer Jeff Modereger’s black-and-white building façades.

The people around Kenneth aren’t deeply drawn, just as the streetscape is bare and contrived. It’s Kenneth’s decision to connect with them that brings them to life. The breakthrough in this story isn’t Kenneth’s sudden ability to master the world but our ability to see what prevented him from feeling safe. Hope rises, too, as the very vulnerable Kenneth starts to see the kindness around him, the kindness of people who are real and not imaginary.

Mario Dominguez Hernandez lives in Hinesburg with his family, but he grew up in Mexico City. In the country’s massive capital, he could find food representing every one of Mexico’s 31 states. “Each state is their own world,” the 50-year-old chef said. “In cooking, they have their own techniques and their own ingredients.”

The dishes, he said, range from the Yucatán’s pit-roasted meat seasoned with seeds from the region’s achiote trees to Michoacán-style pork carnitas cooked in hammered copper pots to fish tacos from Baja California.

Dominguez Hernandez was introduced to a different kind of Mexican food when he arrived in the U.S. more than 20 years ago and started working in an Ann Arbor, Mich., burrito shop.

In Mexico, he knew burritos as simple, compact flour tortilla wraps filled with cheese and beans. In Michigan, Americanized burritos approaching the size of a newborn came stuffed with rice, beans, meats, melted cheese, salsa and even guacamole. They had their charms but weren’t what Dominguez Hernandez recognized as authentically Mexican.

The young cook understood, he said. He recalled thinking, We’re in America, so we need to try to make something for the American.

These days, Dominguez Hernandez works as a line cook at Hinesburgh Public House and partners with his wife on Las Hermosas, a pop-up event and catering company specializing in authentic tacos. He recognizes the cultural balancing act facing a new crop of sit-down Mexican restaurants in northern Vermont. While their regional influences vary, they offer a mix of classic dishes along with well-established Mexican American hybrids.

For example, the Casa restaurant group’s trio of owners hail from the state of Jalisco, but the popularity of their Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex menu has powered them to open three Vermont spots within 13 months. The family that owns Los Jefes has shared dishes from their native Guerrero in a new location in St. Albans since last spring. A pair of longtime friends with Indigenous Oaxacan roots started serving scratch-made traditional dishes at El Comal in Williston at the beginning of January. A couple of weeks later, a Southern California native brought what he calls “California-style Mexican” to Middlesex with Chico’s Tacos & Bar.

Customer tastes vary as widely as the food these restaurants offer. Read on to find what you like, and buen provecho — enjoy.

— M.P.

Masa Masters

El Comal, 28 Taft Corners Shopping Center, Williston, 764-0279, on Instagram: @elcomalwillistonvt

The décor at El Comal in Williston is minimal. One might even describe the cement-floored dining room of the small Oaxacan-style restaurant as austere. A few strips of woven red cloth hang around a window into the kitchen and a couple of pieces of traditional terra-cotta cookware, including an example of the restaurant’s eponymous round comal griddle, sit on the window shelf.

Asked if there were plans to add art, El Comal co-owner Cayetano Santos, 35, pulled a framed, intricately embroidered shirt from behind the register and said he just needed time to put more in frames.

Since they opened their restaurant in January, Santos and his business partner, Casimiro De Jésus Martínez, 36, have been focused on the food. The two met while attending high school in Albany, N.Y. Both have worked for years in restaurants, and Santos is also an interpreter of Indigenous Oaxacan languages such as their native Triqui.

At El Comal, the pair work with a small team of family and friends to re-create the food of their heritage as closely as possible. They source a rainbow of heirloom corn varieties, beans and dried chiles from Indigenous farmers. They char tomatoes and tomatillos on comals to make salsas and grind spices, toasted chiles, Oaxacan chocolate and garlic in a stone mortar and pestle for sauce bases. They go through the time- and labor-intensive process of nixtamalizing corn by boiling it with lime and then grind fresh masa daily for housemade tortillas and other corn-based menu items.

The color of that masa depends on which corn is in rotation. On my first visit, the tortilla for a simple but delicious sirloin taco ($8) and a triangular, bean-stuffed, griddled tetela ($6) were made with yellow corn masa. During a second meal, the soft, warm tortillas that came with our spicy chicken mole ($27); crunchy toasted tortillas called totopos that paired with chunky guacamole ($9.50); and a small, thick round of griddled masa known as a memelita topped with refried beans and optional steak ($10) were all the purplish hue of a blue-corn batch.

“We have one corn just for pozole,” Santos said, referring to the soup ($16) made with soaked and hand-peeled kernels, scratch-made broth and shredded chicken. I savored each soul-nourishing spoonful, liberally laced with El Comal’s smoky, guajillo chile-based red salsa. (Off-menu spicy salsa is available for chile-heads.)

Though not trumpeted on the menu, many fresh vegetables and meats — such as the pozole chicken and the full leg draped in a complex fruity, chocolatey, chile-warmed mole — come from Vermont farmers, including Misty Knoll Farms in New Haven, Morgan Brook Farm in Westford and Jericho Settlers Farm.

Ingredient quality and sourcing, Santos said, “is really important for the flavor.” That attention to detail extends to technique. Do not expect to zip in and out of El Comal. “Everything we do is to order,” he said.

Along with décor additions, the co-owners expect to start serving beer, spirits and cocktails within a couple months.

While I was chatting with Santos, Richmond’s Farr Farms delivered several flats of eggs, which star sunny-side up in the restaurant’s chilaquiles ($17) with fried tortilla strips, tangy green tomatillo salsa and crumbled fresh cheese called queso fresco. Clearly, a brunch visit is in order.

— M.P.

House Party

Casa Azteca, 1450 Barre-Montpelier Rd., Berlin, 505-4064, casaaztecavt.com

Casa Grande, 22 Merchants Row, Williston, 662-5632, casagrandevt.com

Casa Real, 85 South Park Dr., Colchester, 495-5952, casarealvt.com

With margaritas almost big enough to swim in, insistently festive décor and hefty servings of American-style Mexican food, the three Casa restaurants in Chittenden and Washington counties are all about satisfying the palates of as many Vermonters as possible.

“It’s Mexican food that pleases the American taste,” said Francisco Guzman, 42, who teamed up with his 32-year-old brother Ricardo and their friend Eduardo Fuentes, also 32, to open Casa Real in Colchester in December 2023. Lines soon wound out the door, and within a year the trio had added Casa Grande in Williston and Casa Azteca in Berlin for a total of 500 seats.

The Jalisco natives each own Mexican restaurants in other U.S. states. They landed in Vermont “almost by accident,” Francisco said, when Ricardo started considering locations in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and a real estate agent suggested looking across the lake.

The Casa restaurants, which share the same encyclopedic menu, evoke opinions as strong as their margaritas. Fans praise the massive servings of Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex-influenced food, professional service, and merry maraca parade ambience. Detractors sniff at the lack of nuanced flavors and the Americanized food, which even includes chicken wings and deep-fried cheesecake.

When a friend revealed that he fell in the pro-Casa camp, I asked why. “The quality varies from really quite good to mediocre, but I am always happy,” he responded. His first visit to Casa Real reminded him of Tex-Mex places in his suburban Cleveland hometown, where servers and some customers are native Spanish speakers. “It was a completely different cultural and culinary experience than any I had had in Burlington,” he said.

Like my friend, I’ve found the food uneven, though the service is among the most efficient I’ve experienced recently in Vermont.

The highlight of my inaugural Casa Real meal were bites stolen from a dining companion’s tacos de birria ($14.99), which were cheesy and fried crunchy around shreds of beef with a cup of slurp-worthy dipping broth. Less enticing was my carnitas plate ($15.99), on which tender meat had crisply browned edges but lacked flavor.

On a visit to Casa Grande, I invited a friend, a Casa fan who grew up in Texas, to enlighten me. Before we even sat down in the busy Williston restaurant, a server delivered chips and salsa, swiftly followed by the tableside guacamole ($9.99) cart, whose steward seemed to know we wanted it before we did. It took about as long for her to make a good, classic guacamole from scratch as it took our main dishes to arrive. Five minutes from order to delivery hints at many premade components: a plus for efficiency, a minus for freshness.

My Texan friend beamed over his Casa Grande burrito ($15.50), which evoked childhood taste memories. I could imagine a ravenous teenager wolfing down the burly burrito striped with a Mexican flag of sauces and stuffed with a tasty mash of chicken, beans, rice, lettuce, sour cream, jalapeños and pico de gallo. For anyone else, it was at least two meals.

The special fajitas ($21.50) were similarly abundant, a heap of well-seasoned chicken, steak, shrimp, bell peppers and onions, though regrettably oily from the chorizo sausage.

A repeat of my Casa Real carnitas order came with sad, gray hunks of meat, lacking any hint of browning this time. (Francisco later told me I could have requested it fried, not something I’ve ever needed to do.)

I consoled myself with the “skinny” margarita ($15.99) made with fresh-squeezed juice. It delivered a nice tart balance, unlike those ordered with sour mix. At a nearby table, maracas punctuated a rousing server chorus of “Happy Birthday to You.”

— M.P.

Cali Cool

Chico’s Tacos & Bar, 970 Route 2, Middlesex, chicostacos802.com

Chico’s Tacos & Bar’s gordo burrito is as fat as its name promises: The sauce-slathered, overstuffed entrée is so huge that it only has a 70 percent finish rate.

Big portions are a signature of Southern California-style Mexican food, owner-operator Andrew Lay said. When you leave his new spot across from Middlesex’s Camp Meade, “you’re not gonna be hungry.”

Lay, 42, opened Chico’s in the former Filling Station on January 15. The Fullerton, Calif., native is a U.S. Army veteran and culinary school-trained chef. He’s got 13 years of fine-dining experience, but for his first restaurant, he thought Vermont deserved some of the Mexican food he grew up with.

“In Southern California, it’s all about freshness,” Lay said.

Originally, he planned to serve a fast-food, counter-service version of SoCal Mexican cuisine. Soon after opening, he realized people wanted to sit and hang out in the quirky 24-seat space, which has been updated with a bright desert mural.

On a Saturday afternoon in early March, a group of friends caught up over nachos and lunch beers at Chico’s small bar. My husband, toddler and I grabbed a table near the garage door — still closed on that snowy day, but Lay said he’ll open it once it’s warmer outside than in.

My husband and I split a nicely executed classic margarita ($14), and a tamarind Jarritos ($3) — my favorite flavor of the Mexican soda. To eat, he took on the challenge of the gordo ($18, plus $3 for beef barbacoa). He finished it, but only because I couldn’t stop picking at pieces of the rich, best-selling barbacoa, a slow-cooked filling which Lay makes with short rib and beef tongue.

“Everyone hears ‘beef tongue’ and is like, ‘Eww,’” Lay said. “But it tastes like roast beef.”

I opted for tacos, ordering guajillo chile-lime chicken and carnitas ($5 each) to share with my son. They came on soft corn tortillas — from Burlington’s excellent All Souls Tortilleria — simply topped with cilantro, onion, lime and cotija cheese.

I kept the Baja fish taco ($6) for myself. Lay said Chico’s version is an homage to a California chain, Rubio’s, which claims to be the “home of the original fish taco.” He covers fresh Atlantic cod with a gluten-free cornmeal-based batter, frying it to a perfect, light crunch further heightened by shredded cabbage. An acidic punch from pickled jalapeños and cilantro-lime crema transported me straight to the beach.

Overall, Chico’s keeps things pretty true to California’s take on Mexican cuisine, with one big Vermont twist: maple syrup in the flan and in the red enchilada sauce. When in las Montañas Verdes, right?

— J.B.

Who’s the Boss?

Los Jefes, 36 S. Main St., St. Albans, 528-5971, losjefes.us

When I lived in Brooklyn in my early twenties, I often took an hourlong, three-train journey to taco crawl through Sunset Park, where Mexican restaurants and grocers abound. Driving to St. Albans from my home in Vergennes recently, I remembered how far I’ll go for good tacos. At Los Jefes on South Main Street, I found them.

The Ramirez family first opened Los Jefes in June 2023 in a shopping plaza half a mile north. Last May, they moved their restaurant into the former Main Squeeze storefront.

“We were more hidden there,” Yesica Sanchez, 43, said of the original spot. “This is the main street; people can see us.”

“A lot of people didn’t even know there was a Mexican restaurant in town,” added her son Yahir Ramirez, 21.

Cofounded by Sanchez’s 22-year-old son, Luis Ramirez, Los Jefes serves a wide array of classic Mexican dishes — including those from Sanchez’s native Guerrero, such as mole, tamales, and posole with hominy and shredded pork, which she learned to cook from her mother when she was young. The menu has expanded at the new location and now includes regular specials such as fried fish and menudo, a spicy beef soup. Everything is made fresh daily, Sanchez said.

I was the only diner when I stopped in for a late lunch on a recent Wednesday, though several customers stopped in to pick up takeout orders. I grabbed a comfy booth by the big front windows and promptly received a basket of freshly fried chips and salsa roja. I got a glass of horchata ($3.50), a sweet rice-based drink, to go with them, but the $4.50 margarita was awfully tempting.

When I ordered the birria tacos, my server gently suggested the quesabirria ($14.50) instead, saying the saucy shredded-beef tacos are even better with cheese. Most things are, so I agreed.

Mere moments later, a plate of three crispy, juicy folded tacos arrived with a bowl of rich, savory broth for dipping. Partway through, I realized I was unintentionally ignoring a vibrant salsa verde that came with the tacos and started slathering that on, too. As I dipped and slurped and pulled long strings of melted cheese with my teeth, I was glad no one else was there to witness my mess.

“You have to add the salsa,” Yahir later told me. “Some people say our food is bland, but Mexico is all about the different variety of salsas. It adds a whole new layer of flavor.”

Los Jefes has three kinds of salsa, Sanchez explained, at varying levels of spice. When customers ask for the hottest one, “it surprises me,” she added with a laugh. “Especially when they say, ‘I need more.’”

Having a more prominent location on St. Albans’ growing restaurant row has helped Sanchez share her culture — and food — more broadly, while working with her sons to run a successful business, she said. “My American dream.”

— J.B.

This commentary is by Amanda Kay Gustin of Barre City. She is the director of collections and access at the Vermont Historical Society and has worked in museums and archives for nearly 25 years.

In March 2020, thanks to Covid-19, the world as we knew it changed forever.

As an historian, I’ve spent my life trying to understand the past, to put myself in the shoes of people across centuries, and to trace the lines of decisions and trends that led us to where we are now. Though I’d already lived through historic events, never before had I so clearly felt the tides of history turning in real time.

Within days of the pandemic lockdown orders, the Vermont Historical Society set up systems for capturing what was happening, and within weeks I outlined a project that began in September 2022. That fall, we started work that would ultimately take the better part of the next three years.

Field interviewers spanned the state and interviewed over 100 Vermonters about their experiences. Our only guiding question was, “What has the experience of Covid-19 been like for you?” Then we listened.

We heard stories of joy and pain, of change and stasis, coming from every corner of Vermont, every walk of life, and every facet of human experience. Covid-19 was both a universal and an intensely private experience, and every single person’s story was a kaleidoscope of humanity. These experiences are now preserved and held in the public trust, available to generations of future historians.

Funding for this crucial project came from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency that supports projects like this one nationwide. It’s one of the key partners for history organizations to advance big, ambitious projects, and VHS has used it in the past for other collecting projects and key initiatives to preserve Vermont’s history. Though the Covid-19 project is wrapping up, we have another ongoing grant from IMLS that teaches professional skills to Vermont’s dozens of local historical societies.

On Friday, March 14, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to eliminate IMLS, describing it as “unnecessary.” VHS and hundreds of organizations like ours do not know if we will receive reimbursement funding for the work we have already done, and whether we can continue important work that we have planned in the coming months and years.

Good history work is not profitable or efficient. It requires time and care and focus, with dedicated people at every step. It requires the passion of local volunteers, the expertise of trained educators, librarians and collections managers, and it requires funding. In Vermont, for many projects, it requires national funding partners and federal agencies. 

History is not “unnecessary.” It is the record of our shared humanity, and the way that we learn lessons about how to go forward. Understanding what happened during Covid-19 will help us process our painful experiences and plan better for how to respond to similar events in the future. 

Without history, we are lost. And without federal funding partners like IMLS, we will lose the tools that we need to do the work of history.