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 second son to join the clergy. But both have flamed out. The gregarious Junior (Glenn Davis), a disgraced politician, has his father’s drive but not his sense of destination; he has just gotten out of prison for misappropriating campaign funds. His younger brother Nazareth (Jon Michael Hill) has dropped out of divinity school—a development he calls “the Great Disappointment”—and withdrawn from the world to chronicle the ravages of climate change as a doomy nature-porn photographer.
Purpose | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin
Naz also serves as our narrator, and Jacobs-Jenkins has him deliver teasers throughout the play—overt foreshadowing to keep us on the hook, whether calling attention to his father’s rifle (“I had no idea how big of a role this metal tube was going to play this weekend”) or setting the table for the inevitable suppertime conflagration (“It's worth giving you the heads up that meals with my family can very quickly resemble, like, the Olympics of Doing the Most”). But we also serve a purpose for him. We’re his confidant, allowing him to express things that his antisocial tendencies might otherwise silence; Hill’s Naz is so open and charming and talkative when he addresses us directly that you might forget how seldom he says anything of substance to the other characters, and how badly it can go when he does.
These other characters include the women in the Jasper men’s lives. Solomon’s wife Claudine (a masterful LaTanya Richardson Jackson) is the steel that holds the group together: a woman who, as Naz says, “has cultivated a real...reputation for generosity and elegance and faithfulness and intelligence,” and who doesn’t use her law degree because “she prefers this professional work of the matriarch.” Junior’s over-it wife, Morgan (Alana Arenas), is about to go to prison herself for her role in her husband’s embezzlement scandal, and is none too happy about it. And then there is Aziza (Kara Young), a New Yorker whom Naz is trying to get pregnant, and who provides necessary perspective on the inner workings of the Jasper machine. Young is enormously vibrant and sympathetic in the role; one of the great pleasures of the past few years has been watching her Broadway star ascend. (At the performance I attended, she got entrance applause.)
Purpose | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin
All unhappy-family plays are not alike, but Purpose happens to have a lot of elements in common with Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love, which was on Broadway earlier this season: perfect-family mythology, religion, parenthood, queerness, mental illness, even a son who dropped out of a seminary. But whereas that play mostly cut those questions into bite-size pieces, Jacobs-Jenkins makes them into a meal, and serves them hot in the dinner scene that ends the first act. The table itself is round—Solomon’s old TV-punditry show was called The Roundtable—and has often been the site of Jasper family argument and speechifying. (“Playing devil's advocate is just like... our love language,” Naz explains.”) But not like this: Soon, secrets are exposed, harsh words are said, and Solomon is thundering against his family’s affinity for putting up fronts—or as he puts it, “Falsehoods! Lies! Deception!” It’s such a Classic American Drama moment that you half expect him to add “Mendacity!” from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Purpose | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin
Purpose was commissioned by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, where it premiered last year, and it’s in line with the conflict-heavy American ensemble dramas for which the company is famous (including Tracy Letts’s 2007 barn burner August: Osage County). That it works so well on Broadway is partly a testament to the impeccable designers (the costumes are by Dede Ayite, the lighting by Amith Chandrashaker) and the six terrific actors—all but Jackson and Young originated their roles—but also to its director, Phylicia Rashad, whose entire life seems to have prepared her for this material. As a veteran sitcom actor, she knows how to land the laughs, which is essential to the Purpose’s success. But it’s deeper than that. The pressures of Black Excellence are not only part of Rashad’s own history—she and her sister, Debbie Allen, were raised by their formidable mother, Vivian Ayers Allen, with great expectations—but also her most famous role as an actor: that of Clair Huxtable in the aspirational world of The Cosby Show, itself now tarnished by scandal. The Jaspers’ decor could easily transfer to the set of that program, and Rashad is very much in on the joke. The painting that hangs near the dining table is Ellis Wilson’s Funeral Procession—the very painting that Clair bought at auction in Season 2, and which hung above the Huxtable hearth for the remainder of the series.
But above all, of course, the show works because of Jacobs-Jenkins’s writing, which is probing without losing its humor and bracingly honest without being cruel. Purpose is a big swing, but that’s what it takes to get a big hit. Jacobs-Jenkins’s breakthrough play, An Octoroon, was a rejection of old theatrical conventions. This one takes a seat at the table, where—rising to the occasion—it makes speeches, makes trouble and makes excellent theater.
Purpose. Helen Hayes Theater (Broadway). By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Directed by Phylicia Rashad. With Jon Michael Hill, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix, Glenn Davis, Alana Arenas, Kara Young. Running time: 2hrs 45mins. One intermission.
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Purpose | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin
