When I first saw that Zach Braff and Sutton Foster were doing an Off-Broadway play together called Trust, I was very excited.  I loved Zach Braff on Scrubs and Sutton Foster in her various musical comedy performances on Broadway.  Given the stars  talent with humor, I thought Trust would be a light comedy with not much to think about.  I walked into the theater, and in less than one minute of stage time, I realized that the play was MUCH darker than expected.

Written by Paul Weitz, the play centers around Harry (played by Braff) a rich married man who decides to go to an S&M parlor.  Domestic violence, blackmail and dominatrixes abound, but the play manages be funny anyway.  It pushes about as many boundaries as an R rated movie does, which teens have been watching since they were pre-teens.  Trust is very smart.  It makes reference to the elite high schools Stuyvesant and Nightingale among other requisite pop culture images. Weitz is a master of dialogue, and writes how people speak nowadays.  The show in all gets a lot of laughs.  It’s probably because there are so many dark scenes and topics that comic relief is desperately needed.

Zach Braff has completely shaken off all the nerdy John Dorian mannerisms of his Scrubs days.  He manages to play Harry with a searing honesty.  Sutton Foster, who is usually the singing dancing leading lady in musicals, steps out of her comfort zone by playing a dominatrix obsessed with control.  She does so with skill, though it takes a while to warm up to her.  Her performance has layers of both harshness and innocence.  Ari Graynor plays Braff’s wife, a cynical rich girl, but Weitz does not really develop her character enough to make the audience care about her depression and other problems.  Bobby Cannavale plays Foster’s abusive boyfriend, who mostly is a controlling thug who uses violence as his main tactic.  He does this well, but like Ms. Graynor, he is not given much to work with.

Overall, the play is a roller coaster in that it has so many high points where the comedy is there and the performances are lovely, but then reaches low points where the characters don’t seem real.  Plot twists seem to occur for the shock value, not necessarily because they needed to happen.  I made the mistake of seeing the show specifically because I love Sutton Foster and Zach Braff and though they weren’t disappointing, the material itself could have used a few rewrites, and a touch more light to offset the dark.