Bluesky

In the monologue that opens Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose, Naz (Jon Michael Hill) describes the nature photography that he’s been working on recently. He’d been shooting large-format prints of lakes in Ontario, he explains, and was trying to capture the mist that rises off their mirrored surface at dawn. “It was really the fog that interested me—much more than the lakes,” he says. “The right combination of fog and morning light and the lake reflecting it all was somehow very spooky and serene at the same time.”

Those early lines come in the first of many interludes in which Naz looks back on the play’s events, describing the dramatic action in the past tense and then entering it in the present, inviting us to consider how reliable he is as a narrator. In this introductory speech, Naz explains how he had just met up with an ovulating friend to donate sperm and then headed to his family home in Chicago to celebrate his mother’s birthday and the homecoming of his older brother, recently released from prison. In coiling up a lot of plot in this speech, Jacobs-Jenkins leads us to expect another foray into a favorite form of American dramaturgy: the dysfunctional-family play.

With its squabbling siblings, imperious patriarch, alternately charming and caustic mother, and mounting mayhem—constructed by the playwright with precise engineering and zinging language—Purpose has all the makings of a canonical entry in this genre. More than that—and unlike many feuding-family dramas in which the discord stays internal, a matter of personal slights and ancient resentments—Purpose situates its characters, over the course of nearly three hours, in a world beyond the living room, showing the impact that the realms of politics and faith have had on their most intimate life choices (and vice versa). Even though the play is fully grounded in narrative realism, a metaphysical mist rises from its surface: With Naz’s opening lines, Jacobs-Jenkins throws us into something “spooky and serene,” not so much beneath the pleasurable sheen of a familiar genre but emanating instead from his ingeniously revamped version of it.

Some 15 years into his career, Jacobs-Jenkins is undoubtedly one of the most formally inventive and socially astute artists in American theater. His restless imagination, mischievous wit, and fervid intellect have brought us multifarious plays that take up questions of social representation and the self, how one makes meaning (as a person and as a playwright), the spectacles of American racism and violence, the call to individual moral accounting, and the ticking inevitability of death. Purpose is largely a culminating work in his oeuvre, one that digs into these themes even as it brings a new lived-in depth to the inner lives of its characters and explores the significance of their political engagement.

Jacobs-Jenkins burst onto the scene in 2010 with Neighbors, a satirical investigation of the racist caricatures haunting American theater (and society). In a knee-jerk response to the play’s use of Black actors playing exaggerated minstrel roles in blackface—and to their wild erotic acts—critics stirred up a minor scandal around it. (For example, the stage directions instruct one character to lighten a load of stuff he has to carry in his arms by picking up a bugle with his anus.) A few years later, after a brief spell in Berlin, Jacobs-Jenkins premiered two astonishing—and astonishingly different—plays in New York, bringing him the first of many awards (Obies for both, and in the decade since, a MacArthur “genius” grant and, this season, a Pulitzer and a Tony for Purpose).

One of those plays, An Octoroon (2014), is an ingenious reclamation of the once hugely popular 1859 melodrama The Octoroon, by Dion Boucicault. Jacobs-Jenkins stages scenes from Boucicault’s play while framing and infiltrating them with contemporary, critical, and comic material. In an opening monologue, the playwright’s surrogate, BJJ, complains about the burdens placed on Black artists: “I can’t even wipe my ass without someone trying to accuse me of deconstructing the race problem in America.” From there, the play goes on to do exactly that, as it critiques the role that melodramatic spectacle has played in bolstering racist assumptions.

Jacobs-Jenkins’s first realist family play, Appropriate, premiered in the same season. Another shrewd piece of drama as criticism, the play highlighted an unremarked but obvious quality of works by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Sam Shepard: The families featured in their plays are white (or belong to ethnic groups in the process of entering the ranks of whiteness). Although, as Jacobs-Jenkins has noted, those families were deemed “universal,” the Youngers in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun or the Charles clan in August Wilson’s Piano Lesson were seldom recognized in the same manner; rather, their experiences were typically described as being “about” race.

Appropriate rectifies this imbalance by making its characters’ whiteness a conspicuous, inescapable part of the legacy they are grappling with: In the play’s central action, three siblings convene in Arkansas (along with their partners and children) to organize an estate sale at the former plantation owned by their recently deceased father. They bicker and pick at each other’s old wounds (divorce, addiction, lurid transgressions) as snarkily and cruelly as any grudge-bearers in a cantankerous family drama. But in this case, the inheritance they’re arguing over turns out to include an album of lynching photos, with all that it implies.

Appropriate was revived on Broadway last year—and in the Hayes, the same theater where Purpose is now playing (which is particularly apt since its recent renovation mirrors what Jacobs-Jenkins achieves theatrically: It layers new ideas onto old designs, incorporating rather than obscuring them). Appropriate now seems to stand as a bookend to Purpose, as both the early play and the newest work grapple with the elemental ideas of family and race. The feuding Jaspers in Purpose also confront questions of legacy in a grand house, and in both plays outsiders serve as audience surrogates, responding with alarm and revulsion to the dynamics that the family members themselves have come to consider normal.

In the decade between these two commercial and critical hits, Jacobs-Jenkins was working toward the more layered depths he accomplishes in Purpose. In War (2014), the play that came after Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins alights on another site of family trauma, in this case adult children watching their mother slowly die in a hospital room. In subsequent plays—the macabre workplace satire Gloria (2015), and the canny update of a medieval morality play Everybody (2017)—he continued to examine violence and spectacle, the shock of mortality, and the crisis of meaning that it produces.

After reworking Euripides’ The Bacchae in Girls (2019), Jacobs-Jenkins surprised audiences with a stunning character drama, The Comeuppance (2023), in which a group of old classmates meet up to “pre-game” their post-pandemic 20-year high school reunion. The specter of death hovers over their increasingly strained reminiscences—literally, as in quick surrealist moments, the voice of the Grim Reaper speaks through each character in turn and they feel life’s deepest doubts rattle their souls. One of them seems to speak for this group of millennials—and prefigures the themes of Purpose—when she describes her malaise: “I thought I was supposed to feel more and more clear about my purpose.” But lest such an account trace too teleological a line in his oeuvre to date, Jacobs-Jenkins threw critics off the scent with another new work this season, Give Me Carmelita Tropicana, a fabulously queer and zany caper that he cowrote with the performance artist Alina Troyano (who is also a former teacher of his in grad school).

In the play—in which Troyano plays herself alongside Branden, a fictional version of Jacobs-Jenkins—Alina has decided that it is time to eject from her body and psyche her performance alter ego, Carmelita, and so Branden (Ugo Chukwu) offers to buy the persona. The trippy quest takes us to the land of Phantasmagoria, where we encounter, among others, Walt Whitman, Sor Juana de la Cruz, a cockroach married to a mouse, a Spanish horse, and a vengeful goldfish that grows to enormous proportions. Give Me Carmelita Tropicana is concerned, too, with matters of legacy: What is it to inherit the intellectual property of someone else’s self-invention? And in doing so—as Branden absorbs the persona of a Cuban American lesbian a generation his senior—how permeable will those stubborn boundaries of race, gender, class, and ethnicity prove to be? What are the limits of a movement (here, an artistic one), and when is it over? As he did with Greek tragedy, medieval morality plays, 19th-century melodrama, and American living-room realism, Jacobs-Jenkins is breaking and entering into an older form—1980s and ’90s queer performance art—and subjecting it to sharp and poignant scrutiny as he and Troyano bend it to new ends.

Among the new ends in Purpose is an exploration of how dedicating oneself to the fight for racial justice shapes one’s identity and, for better and worse, that of the next generation. Purpose has garnered much acclaim for sharply peeling away the layers of raucous family dynamics, particularly in the sizzling dinner scene that ends the first act. The entire production, crisply directed by Phylicia Rashad, has deservedly received high accolades. Less appreciated has been the play’s reflection on civil-rights-era leaders and the near-epigenetic traumatic toll that the struggle took on their children.

The Jaspers aren’t just any Black family; they are latter-day members of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth.” The racial representation that concerns the Honorable Reverend Solomon Jasper (Harry Lennix) and his wife, Claudine (Brenda Pressley), is the democratic kind: equal voice and opportunity in governance, education, career, and everything else—not the kind involving culture and theory interrogated in Jacobs-Jenkins’s earlier work. Still, the tension between public perception and the possibility of an authentic self unsettles the members of the family.

When Naz’s friend Aziza (Kara Young), the recipient of his sperm donation, arrives unexpectedly, she is gobsmacked to discover which Jasper family he belongs to. Solomon, she declares, is “a goddamned civil rights icon,” and when she meets him, she immediately sidles up and begins snapping selfies. As bemused as he may be by Aziza, Solomon relishes her adulation. He’s no stranger to this attention; nor does he shy away from a photo op. The family’s well-appointed living room, with a grand staircase leading to the bedrooms, is decorated with portraits of Solomon alongside various Black luminaries.

A snowstorm swirling outside traps Aziza in the house overnight. But the conditions inside are at least as hazardous as they are out on the icy roads: Claudine, an attorney, has put her own career on hold to manage her husband’s and to keep the family’s reputation burnished to a virtuous luster. We see how militant she is about the family’s image, not least because Solomon has secret offspring making demands. As for their sons, they are constantly reminded what disappointments they have turned out to be. Naz (short for Nazareth), expected to embrace his father’s religious calling, has dropped out of divinity school. His older brother, Junior (Glenn Davis), slated to follow Solomon’s political path, served as a state senator until he was found guilty of embezzling campaign funds; he cites a recent bipolar diagnosis as an excuse. Junior’s wife, Morgan (Alana Arenas), convicted along with him, is about to enter prison, as the couple were granted consecutive sentences for the sake of their young children.

Some of these details recall the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his felonious, bipolar son, a former congressman convicted of misusing campaign funds, whose wife also went to prison after he came out. Though the Jaspers don’t map onto the Jacksons directly, Jacobs-Jenkins has acknowledged that part of his inspiration—as well as his title—came from reading Adolph Reed’s caustic autopsy of Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics. (The play’s Chicago focus also stems from the fact that the city’s famed Steppenwolf Theater commissioned it; Purpose premiered in Chicago last year.)

In his 1986 book, Reed pilloried Jackson as a vain and ruthless opportunist and argued for a shift away from the charismatic leadership style and sermonizing of the civil rights movement. Purpose does not judge Solomon Jasper so harshly, but the play expands on Reed’s diagnosis by using the parents-versus-children conflicts built into a family play to broach the generational divide over political organizing.

The Jasper home—like the old civil rights movement—is hierarchical, devoutly Christian, and led by a high-profile man whose formidable wife labors in his shadow. For Solomon Jasper, the movement resembled the bees he now tends—beekeeping having become his preoccupation as the invitations to flaunt his golden oratory on talk shows and church pulpits have dried up. “We felt as organized as a hive,” Solomon recalls. “Everybody knew their role, knew their potential, that common goal and how to achieve it.”

By contrast, Aziza marched daily in Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. She is pursuing motherhood without any paterfamilias—“I identify as a queer woman,” she announces at dinner—and expects a more horizontally organized arrangement, sharing childcare with her mother and sister (Naz would not be involved) as well as more ad hoc divisions of labor. As an early BLM slogan put it, rejecting the undemocratic structure of its forebear, this is “not your grandfather’s civil rights movement”—or his nuclear family.

Yet Naz’s parents and Aziza find a moving point of affinity toward the play’s end, as she explains how, “with all this chanting about Black lives mattering, I was…walking around with all these new thoughts about life and life mattering and what made it matter.” Claudine and Solomon concur: “That language really works its way inside you,” he observes.

This moment is the hinge that bends Purpose toward a surprising quietude in its final scene, that foggy sphere of spirit that Naz has been trying to capture at the lakes. And it does so by moving away from the fracas of American family dramas and toward a more profound and contemplative sensibility. It reminded me of Anton Chekhov, his tender comic spirit and lyrical beauty. Though Purpose takes a rather un-Chekhovian approach to plot—it tees up and lets fly a lot of events—it adopts the Russian great’s treatment of characters, revealing their self-delusion, arrogance, indulgences, and other faults while eliciting immense, unsentimental compassion for them.

Solomon laments early in the play, “I’m an old man with one foot out the door watching these clowns in Washington try to undo everything we ever did and wondering if any of that was really worth it.” Yet as with Chekhov’s primary characters, the very act of wondering becomes an act of perseverance.

Jacobs-Jenkins drops some important hints that this is where he is heading. Early on, in one of his monologues, Naz describes finding his grandfather’s old rifle in the basement and makes as bald a reference as there can be to Chekhov’s gun: “I had no idea how big of a role this metal tube was going to play this weekend,” Naz tells the audience. And when the weapon eventually does fire, the scene recalls both the tragic gunshot in The Seagull as well as the simultaneously slapstick and horrifying moment in Uncle Vanya when the title character tries to shoot his imperious brother-in-law.

In the last scene of Purpose, Naz and his father discuss faith: how it has been lost and where it might be found again. The day they have just been through has been momentous, and some inchoate change, bigger than themselves, has begun. Naz senses it when Aziza says, after witnessing all the familial mishegas, that she might pursue a different sperm donor. “I felt something around this moment that really took me by surprise,” Naz says. “It was like a string snapping somewhere deep inside me. A string I didn’t notice was even there. I still don’t know how else to describe it.”

This has to be a deliberate echo of the mysterious sound of breaking string called for in the stage directions of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. A loosening of the paternal grip, the severing of old bonds, the end of a social order—scholars and directors have debated the meaning and nature of this curious noise for more than a century. One thing, though, has always been clear about what it portends, and Jacobs-Jenkins carries it into Purpose: that the world must change.