At first glance, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ new Broadway play Purpose bears a striking resemblance to Appropriate, his subversive take on the white domestic dramas the theater world loves so much. Events in both works are instigated by a reunion and propelled by family feuds that reopen old wounds. Buried secrets resurface. Characters yell confessions and spew insults from across rooms and tables. The texture of the language is smooth, the observations piercing and the delivery cutting. A Jacobs-Jenkins play wouldn’t be complete without a sense of clever and hilarious frenzy.
But instead of revolving around a white family negotiating their legacy within the annals of American history, Purpose centers a powerful Black political dynasty recovering from scandal. The play, deftly directed by Phylicia Rashad, chronicles a weekend with the Jaspers, a legendary family whose patriarch Solomon (Harry Lennix) was an icon of the Civil Rights Movement. Their house, in a set lushly designed by Todd Rosenthal, holds relics of his achievements. Photographs of the Reverend cavorting with famous activists adorn the walls, and a shrine to Martin Luther King Jr. sits prominently on a mantle. These days, Solomon has taken up beekeeping, trading the pulpit for a stainless steel smoker.
The family has gathered for a belated birthday toast to their matriarch, Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), a God-fearing woman and former lawyer whose sugary entrance belies a razor-sharp keenness. The celebration coincides with the return of the eldest Jasper, Solomon Jr. (Glenn Davis), who just finished a stint in prison for embezzling campaign funds as state senator. His wife Morgan (Alana Arenas) is there, too. She’s heading to prison for abetting Junior’s crimes. (A judge has allowed them to serve consecutive sentences because of their two young children.) The youngest Jasper, Nazareth, an introverted nature photographer, is begrudgingly in attendance and serves as the narrator of Purpose.
Jacobs-Jenkins’ play — which was commissioned nearly a decade ago by The Steppenwolf Theatre Company and is at the very least inspired by, if not necessarily loosely based on, Jesse Jackson and his family’s turmoils — opens with Nazareth standing under a single spotlight (lighting by Amith Chandrashaker), summarizing the events that brought his kin back to Chicago. He delivers these kinds of monologues throughout the play, punctuating the main narrative with insights on his interior life or, in more trying moments for the audience, a recap.
The first act of Purpose moves at a steady, reliably funny pace. Its similarities to Appropriate, which premiered on Broadway last year and won three Tony Awards, initially make it feel like a mere exercise in inversion. But as dramatic events unfold in the Jasper house, starting with the arrival of Naz’s friend Aziza (a winning Kara Young), Purpose reveals itself to be something more distinctive and at times quite poignant.
The play becomes thematically twinned with Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance in its approach to meditating on the past and stacking it against the present to better understand the future. In Purpose, Jacobs-Jenkins not only crafts a wry, intimate portrait of the Black political class, he also wrestles with its legacy. What were the promises of the ’60s and how have they been fulfilled (or not) in the 2020s?
When Aziza arrives at the Jasper’s Chicago residence, Claudine mistakes the queer social worker for her son’s girlfriend. But Naz and Aziza’s relationship, forged at the height of COVID lockdowns in Harlem, is purely platonic. And, Naz has agreed to be Aziza’s anonymous sperm donor so that she can fulfill a recent dream of raising a child. As a deeply private person, Naz hasn’t told his family any of this, and when Aziza rings the bell to return a phone charger he left in her car, there’s not enough time to correct the record. Claudine insists that Aziza make herself at home and stay for the birthday celebration. Aziza, starstruck by the Jaspers, eagerly agrees.
Accepting the invitation soon becomes more than she bargained for. As the weekend progresses, Aziza, a kind of stand-in for the audience, grows increasingly distressed by the toxic family dynamics in the Jasper home. Solomon tends to his bees and barely speaks to his sons, who have disappointed him by failing to extend his legacy. Junior is a disgraced politician with possible mental health issues and Nazareth dropped out of divinity school to photograph lakes.
On the occasions Solomon does acknowledge the family, his speech is verbose and weighted with the dignified manner of someone used to addressing crowds. Claudine, who at first presents herself as a doting and canonically overbearing mother, soon displays a more cunning shrewdness. Rashad’s sensitive direction, coupled with Richardson Jackson’s finely tuned performance, invests the familiar matriarchal archetype with surprising intimacy.
Purpose might surprise Jacobs-Jenkins diehards in its relatively straightforward melodramatic structure and earnest undercurrents, but the language inspires and, as one character says, “really works its way inside you.” As the weekend unravels, taking wild turns that neither Nazareth nor Aziza could have imagined, the way the Jaspers talk to each other and about themselves becomes more heartbreaking. Their terse exchanges and angry tirades are searching, almost desperate pleas for direction and mutual understanding. They sound like monologues at the end of The Comeuppance, when audiences commune with death and, in the midst of a pandemic, grapple with what it means to die. In Purpose, Jacobs-Jenkins asks us to confront what it means to live.
Venue: Hayes Theater, New York
Cast: LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix, Jon Michael Hill, Alana Arenas, Glenn Davis
Playwright: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Director: Phylicia Rashad
Scenic designer: Todd Rosenthal
Costume designer: Dede Ayite
Lighting designer: Amith Chandrashaker
Sound designers: Rob Milburn, Michael Bodeen
Presented by David Stone, Debra Martin Chase, Marc Platt, LaChanze, Rashad V. Chambers, Aaron Glick, Universal Theatrical Group, Eastern Standard Time, Trate Productions, Nancy Nagel Gibbs, James L. Nederlander, John Gore, ATG Entertainment, The Shubert Organization, Steppenwolf Theatre Company
