Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins finds his ‘Purpose’ on Broadway
A year after speaking with New York Theatre Guide about his Tony Award-winning play Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins discusses his latest family comedy-drama.
Less than a year after his play Appropriate won the Tony Award for Best Revival, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is back on Broadway with Purpose, a raucous family drama about secrets, lies, and the legacy of the fractious Jasper family in Chicago.
Inspired by Jesse Jackson and his loved ones, the deep, daring, and at times hilarious work exposes “the gaping divide between shiny public personas and shadowy private realities,” as described in New York Theatre Guide's Purpose review.
Running through July 6 at the Hayes Theater, Purpose is a thematic cousin of Appropriate, which followed siblings who end up at each other’s throats when unsettling secrets surface as they divide their late father’s estate.
Family — along with its joys and jolts — is drenched with dramatic potential that keeps evolving. Jacobs-Jenkins’s father died during Broadway rehearsals for Purpose, which premiered last year at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. “The most automatic and the most direct route to our emotions seems to be family stuff,” the playwright said.
Since New York Theatre Guide last spoke with Jacobs-Jenkins in 2024 about Appropriate, his family has also changed with the arrival of his and his husband's second daughter. (Their home is also newly adorned with the prestigious Tony statuette.) This time, New York Theatre Guide talked to him about Purpose, how it relates to Appropriate, and the theatrical Easter eggs hidden within.
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What was your inspiration for Purpose?
When I started out, I wanted to write a play about a Black dynastic family. There aren’t Black Rockefellers. There aren’t Black Lehmans. The ones I could find were all in the world of politics or politics-adjacent, and they were always church-adjacent. So, I began to read a lot about these families. I would say the family that’s the most legible [in the play] seems to be the Jacksons. But I don't want it to feel like I’m writing a roman à clef here.
Last year, you said family dramas let playwrights “unpack their own sense of self.” How does that relate to Purpose?
Family dramas force a writer to deal with the most personal material. You’re forced to ask yourself, "Well, why do I think mothers are like this? Oh, my mother was like this, or mothers I knew were like this." You have to realize how singular your own relationship to family is and put it out there. I'm sure some academic is going to compare these plays and try to decipher what it is I feel about family.
You also said you read multiple classic American family dramas before writing yours. Nazareth, Purpose's narrator, recalls Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.
For Appropriate, the initial impulse was to synthesize all these plays I love. A little bit of that is happening here. Obviously, Tennessee Williams is a tremendously important influence on me. When I got the commission, I remembered seeing Jon Michael Hill [who plays Nazareth]. All I wanted to do is see him play Tom Wingfield, and I thought, "Well, that’s not gonna happen." Naz is a distant cousin of Tom Wingfield in the same way that Aziza [Naz’s friend, played by Kara Young] is kind of the Gentleman Caller.
No spoilers, but Purpose sometimes feels like it could veer into otherworldly Get Out territory. Was that intentional?
This play is one of the more buttoned-up plays, even compared to Appropriate, and it has a lot to do with the fact that Steppenwolf commissioned it. Their house style is muscular realism. I have a lot of friends who know my work who said they were bracing the whole time for something supernatural or genre-specific to happen.
Do you feel pressure after winning a Tony for Appropriate?
What's made this experience feel so lucky is that it started in Chicago concurrent with Appropriate and before the Tonys. I feel very protected by that.
Are there any Appropriate-related Easter eggs in Purpose?
There’s bugs. Appropriate has cicadas; Purpose has bees.
You use the behavior of bees to drive home the theme of Purpose. Where did that idea come from?
My dad was a dentist, but he was a beekeeper. You just find these things in the writing and follow your instincts.
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Top image credit: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. (Photo courtesy of production)
In-article image credit: Purpose on Broadway. (Photos by Marc J. Franklin)
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