Purpose
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
The Jasper family home in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s great American play Purpose announces what it is right away: the setting for a classic drawing-room drama. On one side is a dining table, where food is sure to come with a fight; an elegant doorway is on the other, and a giant staircase winds down the middle. Since the Jaspers are modeled closely on the family of Jesse Jackson, Todd Rosenthal’s set also serves as an exquisitely curated museum of Black pride: elegant African statues and textiles, historical photos on clay-orange walls, a painting of Martin Luther King Jr. presiding over all. This is the image the Jaspers present to the world, and to some extent to themselves. Entering their company, it’s hard, as one character observes, to avoid “being all dazzled by all the Symbolic Blackness before you—so blinded by the Black Excellence, Black Power, Black Righteousness.”
In his trenchant Appropriate, which was expertly revived on Broadway last year, Jacobs-Jenkins depicted a white Southern family with an outsider’s eye for the characters’ self-deceptions. This time, his call-outs are coming from inside the house. The Jaspers, like the Jacksons, have issues. The family patriarch, Solomon (Radio Golf’s tall, strapping Harry Lennix), is a major figure in Civil Rights history whose hopes for a dynasty have crumbled, and who now glowers like a lion licking his paws. As in medieval times, his elder son was groomed to inherit his mantle and his...