ajhlovestheatre

PURPOSE

by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins 

directed by Phylicia Rashad

Hayes Theatre, New York City – until 31 August 2025

running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval 

https://purposeonbroadway.com

Is Branden Jacob-Jenkins the greatest living American playwright? This cracking family drama, full of bile, fire, and revelations both comic and outrageous, certainly helps stake that claim, especially considered in tandem with last Broadway season’s scorching Appropriate, and the thought-provoking, vaguely supernatural The Comeuppance, given a superb London premiere last year by the Almeida. 

Purpose, tearing up Broadway in a Phylicia Rashad staging that originated at Chicago’s acclaimed Steppenwolf Theatre, is a firecracker, examining the toxicity and trauma lurking underneath the benign surface of the Jaspers, a Black family prominent in the Civil Rights movement and now widely respected and feted. It’s told from the point-of-view of younger son  Nazareth (Jon Michael Hill, sublime), whose Jesus-adjacent name carries its own special weight, bringing into the God-fearing family home Aziza, the free-thinking queer New Yorker (Tony winner Kara Young, who could well be in line to bag a second award on the basis of this performance) for whom he has agreed to be a sperm donor. 

That turns out to be almost the least of the Jasper’s family woes as disgraced politician and elder brother Junior (Glenn Davis) is straight out of a prison sentence for embezzling funds just as his jaw-droppingly bitter wife (Alana Arenas, in an incendiary Broadway debut) is about to go in for misfiled tax returns. Meanwhile, patriarch the Reverend Solomon Jasper (Henry Lennix) is possibly going to be slapped with a paternity suit…oh, and it’s his wife Claudine’s birthday. LaTanya Richardson Jackson plays Ma Jasper with just the right combination of grandeur and manipulation: you can’t help but love this woman but you sure wouldn’t want to cross her. 

She turns out to be even more formidable than she looks, but then the wonderful thing about Jacob-Jenkins’s creations is that all six characters have so many layers and colours, whether it’s Davis’s beautifully observed Junior whose pleas of mental health issues initially seems strangely at odds with his swagger, or Solomon taking up bee-keeping in his latter days as though to give some meaning to a life that is not as honourable as it may seem from the outside. 

The aforementioned Arenas can do as much with a withering stare as many actors achieve with ten pages of dialogue, but when she does start to speak, she -and Jacob-Jenkins- take your breath away. Young makes something wonderfully real and touching out of unwitting interloper Aziza’s journey from star-struck awe at being in the home of a Civil Rights hero to baffled disillusionment. Hill, Davis and Lennix suggest with real sensitivity, as well as marvellous comic timing, a certain aimlessness in the lives of those directly affected by great sociopolitical battles fought but now left with more insidious demons to conquer. 

Jacob-Jenkins’s dialogue just crackles: absolutely hilarious but shot through with truth and fury. Richardson Jackson’s Claudine gets a speech about motherhood near the play’s conclusion that forces one to reconsider some of one’s earlier opinions about her complex character, and she delivers it with extraordinary conviction. 

Rashad’s assured direction means that even an entirely static, but fabulously written, dinner party scene is totally riveting and clear: instead of being frustrated at not catching every nuance and facial expression, you find yourself leaning in. The second half is slightly too long, and I suspect that the direct address to the audience would become tiresome if performed by somebody less engaging than Hill. He’s the conduit between the audience and his crazier-than-they-look family, and he’s irresistible. 

If not quite perfect, this is still American drama at very near its absolute finest. It channels massive themes through the squabbles, foibles and misdemeanours of a family that, even if not immediately relatable, are consistently credible, much of the writing is sensational, and the examination of the binds of family is cast in a sizzling new light. 

This Steppenwolf production reeks of quality and detail, from the snow falling outside the windows of Todd Rosenthal’s deluxe but tellingly  antiseptic family home seating to Dede Ayite’s costumes and Amith Chandrashaker’s time-conveying lighting, to the perfectly judged pace. Given the London stage acclaim for the aforementioned Appropriate and The Comeuppance as well as the same writer’s bonkers-ly brilliant An Octoroon, it’s likely that Purpose will end up in British theatres at some point, but it may not have the same authenticity as it does here. 

If you thrilled to Tracy Letts’s August: Osage Country, another meaty tragicomedy that saw a family imploding around the dinner table, and which also originated at the same Chicago theatrical powerhouse, the chances are that you will love this. If you’re in NYC this summer, this is so worth catching if you’re after something provocative and intelligent but compulsively entertaining, plus the opportunity to see a sextet of fine African American actors at the very top of their game. As Nazareth rightly says to the audience in the slipstream of yet another fiery Jasper family revelation: “buckle up!”