(from left) Jon Michael Hill, Kara Young, and Harry Lennix in Purpose. Photo: Marc J. Franklin, 2025
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins writes, always, in dialogue with theater and cultural history, and his new Broadway play, Purpose, doesn’t hesitate to announce its lineage. Commissioned by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre for their renowned ensemble of actors, Purpose is, as Jacobs-Jenkins describes in a Playbill article, a “Steppenwolf play”: resolutely realistic and set in a single domestic interior, thick with dramatic tension, hefty in length, demanding a kind of “muscular realism” from its actors, flinging over metaphorical stones to reveal family secrets and family shames. It shares DNA with Jacobs-Jenkins’s own Tony-winning Appropriate, but it also inevitably, and gleefully, sets itself up alongside a swath of Great American Family Sagas that flay bare a patriarch and/or a matriarch and their adult children: everything from Edward Albee to Eugene O’Neill to Arthur Miller to August Wilson to Williams to Sam Shepard to Tracy Letts. (Letts’s August Osage County, perhaps the platonic ideal of the Steppenwolf play, comes especially to mind.) It is no accident that these are the Great Men of American theater we’re engaging with here; the three-hour explosion of the nuclear family seems to be a gender-specific genre trope. Purpose feels so self-consciously capital D Dramatic, constantly foreshadowing how much more verbal (and occasionally physical) violence is about to ensue, that it’s pleasantly surprising to find it also often very funny.
It’s a pristinely built, exquisitely acted scorcher—with just as much surgical precision in Phylicia Rashad’s direction as in Jacobs-Jenkins’s writing—showing us two days that peel the smooth surface off the life of a storied Black family. Underneath, we see all the ways that grown children disappoint their parents; parents betray and demean their children; the way shame can be wielded like a weapon and real damage can go unrecognized until too late. And despite all its weightiness, it’s got an offhand lightness, a polished ease that feels as if Jacobs-Jenkins decided it was simply time for him to claim his slot on the bookshelf of this particular canon and spin it in his own inimitable way. (Purpose even finds a new way to play with Chekhov’s infamous gun.)
The humor comes, partly, from a slight gap inserted between the action as it occurs before us and the retrospective vantage of the play’s narrator, the younger son of the Jasper family, Naz (Jon Michael Hill). Naz’s monologues expertly ride the line between self-reflexive soliloquy and a more explicit fourth-wall-breaking address to the audience, underscoring and foreshadowing, analyzing his own feelings in a way that we will come to recognize as customary while also giving us context and warning us where to look next. There’s a certain sleight-of-hand quality to the interplay of narration and action; through Naz, Jacobs-Jenkins keeps us always a few beats ahead of the story—and yet we’re still surprised and gripped as it all plays out. (Though I could have done without the dimming of lights and spotlighting of Naz that comes with these monologues; it feels unnecessary and an oddly clunky choice for designer Amith Chandrashaker, especially because the follow spot felt frequently out of sync at the performance I saw. Yes, it marks the transitions cleanly, but it also slows them down.)
Naz (short for Nazareth) is the “weird son” in the illustrious Jasper clan, scions of the civil rights movement and Chicago’s Black elite. Solomon Jasper Senior (Harry Lennix), a pastor-cum-public-intellectual from a long line of pastors, marched at Selma with Martin Luther King and John Lewis; he appeared in a gallery of Black heroes at the elementary school of another character. (A portrait of Dr. King holds a prime spot on Todd Rosenthal’s impeccably dressed set–which carries allusions not only to Appropriate but oddly also to Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love, both of which played the Hayes in recent months. But note also the veritable gallery exhibit of “historic Jasper moment” photos gracing the second-floor hallway.) His wife, Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), made their home a hub of the movement, turning her own prodigious legal mind to the subtler social arts of the “First Lady.”
Slated to carry on the family legacy of the church while his older brother, Solomon Junior (Glenn Davis), takes up the political career that eluded their father (Harry Lennix), Naz instead, in what he calls his “Great Disappointment,” has dropped out of divinity school and become a successful nature photographer. Meanwhile, Junior has wound up perpetrating another kind of Great Disappointment, misappropriating campaign funds and winding up in prison; his wife, Morgan (Alana Arenas), will have to enter prison as he leaves to serve her own sentence for tax fraud.
Headed to visit his family to celebrate Junior’s release, Naz takes a detour to donate sperm for his friend Aziza (Kara Young). After a series of misadventures involving missed flights, looming snowstorms, and the boundless nosiness of Claudine once she gets an inkling that there’s a woman even remotely in Naz’s life, Aziza ends up staying over. This is an outcome Naz, who has very intentionally not mentioned his family’s fame to Aziza, would do almost anything to avoid on any day, but most especially on the day Junior returns to reclaim his standing in the family—but the die is cast. Let the fireworks begin.
If Naz’s narration keeps our eyes on the plot, Aziza, at first gleefully starstruck, becomes the audience’s stand-in as the family’s structure totters before our eyes, all of them questioning how and where we find a sense of meaning, safety, and the titular purpose in the twenty-first century. It’s a bit of a slow build getting to the big questions, but once we get there, the exploration is thoughtful, even poignant. (In the hands of a lesser director, or lesser actors than Jackson and Young, I might have been more bothered by Claudine’s assurances that Aziza will find her purpose in her child, while Solomon is beekeeping and Naz has the freedom to go off to the woods, but I also can’t say that’s unrealistic for these characters.)
Even in all the melodramatic complexities of the narrative, each figure remains fully realized, tragically real, and yet all too opaque to one another. It’s a family that long ago stopped believing in their mutual support, but clings to their self-image as a model family in both public and private realms, a family that needs to hold tightly to its image of Black excellence and to its image of emotional closeness keep from crumbling—but both images erode before our eyes. (It is telling that in the photo below, all of their focuses are in different directions.)
(from left) Alana Arenas, Kara Young, Harry Lennix, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Glenn Davis, and Jon Michael Hall in Purpose. Photo: Marc J. Franklin, 2025
The characters are both steadfastly rooted in the archetypes of the genre–patriarch with feet of clay; matriarch who’d do anything to protect her family; prodigal son; ungrateful daughter-in-law–and full of modern nuance. The play looks at ideas about lineage and identity in precise and contemporary ways (a discussion of how an expansive look at the spectrum of sexuality intersects with ideas about faith and the ministry, for example).
The performances—unsurprisingly given both the rich characters Jacobs-Jenkins has written and the incisiveness of Rashad’s work with them—are stellar throughout, anchored by Hill’s star turn as Nazareth; his steadiness in guiding the action and his self-reflexive thoughtfulness are the play’s bedrock, but also a kind of defense. In controlling the narrative, he also deflects, for a long time, showing his own vulnerabilities, and a key scene between Naz and his father at the end lets both Hill and Lennix pare back to a new level of honesty. Every actor gets a spotlight moment or three: Jackson’s eruption of rage at her daughter-in-law and her gentle air of authority as she arm-twists Aziza into signing an NDA with the velvetiest of velvet gloves over her iron first. (I feel that she and Audra McDonald’s Mama Rose might have some stories to share). Arenas’s vicious takedown of the family’s hypocrisy paired with her utterly calm early morning explanation of how her marriage has failed her, all vitriol drained away to quiet pain. Lennix’s unfailing ability to drip poison into his family’s ear with an air of righteousness, but also the disappointment that lies behind his flares of contempt at his family, and his gentle, geeky passion for his bees. Hill’s slow realization of all the family secrets that have been kept from him, and of what else he might have been blind to. Davis’s journey from a man trying to regain his political swagger to a man whose foundation has been utterly shattered, his face crumbling as he goes from failure to failure. And, of course, Young’s utter delight at feeling welcomed into Naz’s illustrious family slowly turning to dread and heartbreak at the realization of her own rashness in possibly tying herself to this family.
It’s almost an embarrassment of riches for the acting company, which is exactly as intended. Jacobs-Jenkins can show off his skill at genre-switching like expert bodybuilders display muscles: a deltoid flex here, a Tennessee Williams-flavored southern gothic there; a bicep isolation on this side; a medieval morality play around that corner or a gonzo metadramatic farce waiting in the wings. He does every bit of what he sets out to do here. Personally, I prefer his weirder, more theatrically inventive experiments, but then again, that’s where my own genre preferences come into play. I can’t deny the expertise and craft being displayed here.