Theater Review: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s ‘Purpose’

The expectations of genre may at once signify an imposing edifice that a playwright might stretch themselves to fulfill, and simultaneously, a familiar model to which they can retreat for comfort and direction — something like a family home, especially the one onstage at the Hayes Theater in Purpose. In the multilevel, coral-colored Chicago mansion that is Todd Rosenthal’s set, cut through with a drama-ready spiral staircase, lies the accumulated evidence of the Jasper family’s prominence. There are framed photos of their patriarch Solomon with various Black dignitaries and a large painting of Martin Luther King Jr., alongside a handful of African statues and tasteful Black American art pieces, which soften but don’t obfuscate the overriding emphasis on connection, wealth, and power. The lighting is harshly fluorescent, and so is the parenting. In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s drama, Nazareth (Jon Michael Hill), the wandering son of the Jasper clan, has returned home for his mother’s birthday. With that premise and this set, we’re in for a big, combustible family drama, which in this case stretches to nearly three hours. It’s the kind of thing that’s as intimidating to write as it can be intrinsically pleasurable to watch. “I just love an arguing family, I gotta say,” a woman next to me enthused to her friend as we all hustled to the bathroom at intermission, just after Jacobs-Jenkins had concluded the dinner-table confrontation we’d all been hoping for with a walloping slap.

I assume Jacobs-Jenkins was hoping for a reaction like that, because much of the nearly mathematical pleasure of watching Purpose lies in watching a top-tier craftsman set up and then launch one long domino chain of familial discord. Jacobs-Jenkins is indulging your voyeurism too: Solomon (played by Harry Lennix) is an amalgam of various civil-rights figures, but most clearly Reverend Jesse Jackson. Once the young turk of a movement, he’s now coasting on a series of speaking gigs, his politics out of step with the moment (brace for Solomon’s opinions on climate change). Like Jackson, Solomon has a mercurial, aspiring politician of a son, Junior (Glenn Davis), who, in the timeline of Purpose, is just out of a prison term for tax fraud, and whose wife, Morgan (Alana Arenas), is about to go in and serve her time. Jacobs-Jenkins peers past those headlines to shine more light on the matriarch, in this case a fearsomely sweet LaTanya Richardson Jackson as Claudine, a woman who has built a life out of arranging things just so around her husband; she’s probably thought a lot about the hierarchies of arranging those portraits. Jackson, in a bit of meta-casting, is herself an accomplished Black matriarch, the wife of Samuel L. Jackson and director of The Piano Lesson. She’s also being directed by another, Phylicia Rashad, who also helmed the production at its earlier incarnation at Steppenwolf. (And both have played Lena in A Raisin in the Sun.) Some of Claudine is autobiographical, too, inspired by Jacobs-Jenkins’s mother, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and consultant. All that lends the experience of watching Purpose with imprimatur of the real, an effect that’s both stately and impishly lurid: See what America’s Black elite are really like behind closed doors. When Nazareth’s friend Aziza (Kara Young) gets dragged into the action, stopping off to return a charging cable he left in her car, she’s bowled over to discover she’s in the home of a “Famous Black.” Like an overenthusiastic audience member, she gets out her cameraphone and starts taking selfies.

The complicating factor is that Aziza has just driven Nazareth over from a meet-up in Niagara Falls where he donated her his sperm. She, at the time, didn’t know his lineage. Theirs are some of many secrets that, in a drama like this, are destined to soon be shouted across the room. Jacobs-Jenkins is a quicksilver playwright — he’s dipped in and out of genre with everything from medieval allegory to, at the Soho Rep last winter, a sort of Viking funeral for downtown-performance art. In Purpose, he’s channelling everything from August Wilson, with Junior and Nazareth echoing something like The Piano Lesson’s differing sibling inheritances; to Tennessee Williams, with Nazareth, a Divinity School dropout, as our resident reflective Tom Wingfield; to, since we’re in the realm of near-royalty, an end-of-a-kingdom all-out brawl like The Lion in Winter. But Purpose’s most present counterpoint lies in Jacobs-Jenkins’s own work. In Appropriate, brought to Broadway last winter, he set a white southern family at each other’s necks over an uncovered piece of racist family legacy. That production was a Tony-lauded commercial success. Purpose, setting its sights on a Black family a season later, contains an implicit challenge to Broadway audiences — will they, too, support this? — as well as a thematic mirror of Appropriate. That family is warped by their refusal to see their part in the atrocities of slavery; the Jaspers, on the other hand, are warped by their attempted assimilation into the power systems of whiteness. Also, both works — and I don’t know what to do with this — contain long speeches about lakes.

In Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins’s plotting involves a little hand-waving — the money involved in a real-estate deal, for instance, comes out just right for maximal discord — and in Purpose, there is a deeper sense of authorial overdetermination. The members of the Jasper family, and the women caught in their web, act out partially just because that is what’s dramatically necessary. The first act speeds through one evening right toward one big family dinner, with Jacobs-Jenkins egging expectations along the way. “Meals with my family can very quickly resemble, like, the Olympics of Doing the Most,” Nazareth tells the audience in one aside. At dinner, in one ratcheting moment of tension, Junior delivers a mini-sermon on all he learned about the prison-industrial complex before being undercut by his father, who insists he knows all this already. “Do you think you have made some sort of new discovery about one of the oldest tools of racial oppression in this country?!” Solomon bellows. “And why do I recall having to use my connections to get you transferred to some minimum-security playground after four months?”

In the moment, Lennix is pleasingly leonine, batting at Davis who, as Junior, flits around the stage like a dog stuck in one of those protective conical collars. As a sparring match, it crackles. Junior quickly pivots into an ask: He’s assembled the letters his mother wrote him every day in prison into a book, which he’s hoping to publish as a way to relaunch a political career. Will she let him? Jacobs-Jenkins arms the scene with some sharp punchlines — Claudine’s letters are hopelessly quotidian; one is about seeing Barbie — but never cuts truly deep with character insight. The character’s symbolic positions are clear; it’s like watching Jesse Jackson fight Obama as much as his own son (with the occasional intrusion of Aziza’s BLM-era leftism). But in all that speechifying, these people aren’t much further from their public personas. They’re still performing. That they are doing so, even at home, is both a solid critique of the Jaspers’ self-importance and something that makes it harder to know them as people — to surprise, delight, or horrify us with idiosyncrasy. Purpose has so much ambition and forward momentum, but its little vagueries increasingly rankle. The levers and pulleys of Jacobs-Jenkins’s whole construct are too often visible. Young’s a recurring highlight in any production, and here she’s as ace as usual, but she may simply read as too intelligent for the obliviousness Jacobs-Jenkins asks of Aziza to keep his premise on its rails. Would someone like her really never do a background check, or even a light Google, before asking a guy for genetic material?

For a Branden Jacobs-Jenkins production, Purpose is awfully buttoned-up — even, in an adjective I don’t tend to associate with his work, deferential. Some of that lies in the direction: Rashad takes a straightforward approach to her staging, like she is simply putting up a realist drama. That works well when Purpose is convincing you of its vérité aspects: Lennix and Jackson have some real lived-in give and take; they even seem to putter in harmony. But where moving into another register would be welcome and justified, Rashad stays with two feet on the ground. When the actors sit down at dinner on one side of the stage, for instance, they’re positioned in a way that keeps some of their faces out of view. Hill, meanwhile, applies a convincing winsomeness to Nazareth’s monologues, but seems less guided about how exactly to effect his character’s porous relationship to the fourth wall. (During arguments, he gives a lot of Jim-from–The Office face.) Everyone is locked in, in fact, but not stretched to their full potential. In Arenas, as Junior’s wife Morgan, lies the production’s supply of heavy ammunition. She descends that spiral staircase like a caged panther in designer sunglasses, though Morgan herself tends to be explosive and only explosive. That’s another kind of deference; she’s so well-armed, even the playwright begs off cracking her.

Jacobs-Jenkins has already piled other developments on his plate. In the second act, stretching across a long dark and winter night — maybe the Hayes simply re-upped their lease on the snow machine from Cult of Love — he doles out more family secrets: pills, affair allegations, a gun (hi, Chekhov!). These intensify things toward melodrama, but prove harder for both the actors and the play itself to metabolize. (There’s barely space for a whole other thread involving neurodivergence.) It’s only when the playwright has already brought the action to its conclusion that the Jacobs-Jenkins gets most comfortable. In a long coda between Nazareth and Solomon, he reckons with faith, beekeeping, solitude, and purpose itself (the play’s title is in part a reference to Adolph Reed’s book on Jackson’s presidential campaign). There, themes previously constricted by plot flow more freely, as if Jacobs-Jenkins is getting to a backlog of notes after the fact. There’s something to Purpose, for instance, as a companion COVID-era piece to The Comeuppance. In that play, he cut horizontally across the millennial generation at a high school reunion; here, he traverses vertically, finding in the protests of 2020 an incomplete echo of revolution that came before. (In that, there is also some of the soul-searching of Liberation.) “The summer of 2020, which was also … Well, people used to call it the ‘uprising,’” Aziza says in an earlier scene. “I don’t know what people refer to that time as now — or if people even remember it honestly.” Jacobs-Jenkins uses that moment to introduce the idea that Aziza’s decision to have a child was inspired by those protests. It’s a charged idea, with its image of three generations all bound together in one struggle, though one that isn’t lingered upon in depth. Aziza remains an interloper, both in the drama and in this house. The Jaspers will make sure of that.

See, whenever the Jasper family makes a mess, there’s always Claudine, slipping in from one door or another, to prod her children into pushing that mess under the rug. Nazareth watches one such moment from a doorway as Claudine works her dark magic on Junior, getting a glimpse at a scheming side of her he hadn’t allowed himself to see before. In moments like those, Jacobs-Jenkins reveals some of Claudine’s harsh and icy core. Jackson rises to the occasion. Though she may coo about birthday cake, there’s real calculation behind those chunky glasses. Even with those intrusions, Claudine is always — and this is a recurring aspect of the women in the play, seen as they all are through Nazareth — in the unknowable realm of “mother.” To that point, the playwright is shyly respectful, and that stage picture of her son at the door may be Purpose’s defining image. Nazareth eventually enters the scene, but it is as if Jacobs-Jenkins keeps us in the audience on one side of the doorway. He brings us to the threshold, lets us peer through at this family’s secrets, and then politely draws it shut.

Purpose is at the Helen Hayes Theater.