In 2023, after a decade of earning acclaim and prestigious honors for his plays, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins made his Broadway debut with “Appropriate,” a hilarious, piercing account of a white Southern family forced to confront a legacy of racism. First staged at New York nine years earlier, the work scored Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins a Tony Award for best revival.
With his latest effort, “Purpose,” the playwright does more than maintain his momentum: He secures his place as Broadway’s most incisive and scathingly entertaining chronicler of family and social dysfunction — an inheritor to American giants stretching from Eugene O’Neill to Tracy Letts, but with a voice and perspective that are distinctly of this moment.
On its face, “Purpose” poses a less ghastly scenario than “Appropriate,” which traces the fallout when a prominent Washington figure’s grown children discover, after his death, his fondness for collecting souvenirs of lynchings. The patriarch in Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s new play, Solomon “Sonny” Jasper, is very much alive, and a Black man himself — a celebrated civil rights leader, in fact, who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
A large portrait of King hangs in the handsomely appointed living room, designed by Todd Rosenthal, that Sonny shares with his wife, Claudine, in Illinois. Although educated as a lawyer, Claudine has dedicated herself to what Nazareth, the younger of her two sons, describes as the “professional work of the matriarch” — a job that, in this case, can entail “putting some things and/or people in a headlock and never letting go.”
As we’ll learn, Sonny’s long tenure as a pastor and public figure has not been without scandal. His elder son, Solomon Jr., a state senator — and, like his brother, a crushing disappointment in his father’s eyes, as Sonny will make brutally clear — has had his own troubles: As “Purpose” opens, Junior has just completed two years in prison, having been convicted of embezzling campaign funds and wire fraud.
Nazareth is the “weird son,” as Claudine identifies him, a solitary type who has always preferred the beauty of nature to the discomfort of strangers, to say nothing of his relatives’ antics. Played with gentle wit by Jon Michael Hill, he’s also the narrator, providing background and dry commentary throughout.
A photographer, Nazareth has arrived at his parents’ house after three weeks of shooting lakes in Ontario. The occasion that has brought him back into the lions’ den is a belated celebration of Claudine’s birthday; the delay was set to accommodate Junior’s release. Also in the house, though apparently even less eager to socialize than Nazareth, is Junior’s wife, Morgan, who’s about to begin her own prison stint, for filing false tax returns.
There’s a surprise visitor as well: Aziza, a young woman whose generous and exuberant spirit has cracked through Nazareth’s armor, so that an unusually close bond has formed between them. Although that bond isn’t sexual in nature, the two have embarked on a project as intimate as any other that a couple could pursue.
Nazareth, who is intent to keep this project a secret from his flamboyantly religious parents, isn’t elated when Aziza turns up, but Claudine, thinking that her eternally single son may have finally found a special someone, couldn’t be more delighted. You can’t blame her, particularly since Aziza is played here by the marvelous Kara Young, who gets to channel the ravishing comedic prowess that scored her a Tony Award last season, for a revival of “Purlie Victorious,” into a distinctly contemporary character who’s also deeply endearing.
Under the guidance of another wonderful actress, Phylicia Rashad, making her Broadway directorial debut, the other actors also prove adroit in serving the rollicking, biting humor and elegant poignance that are so seamlessly integrated in Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s writing. Glenn Davis gives texture and pathos to Junior, showing us he’s more than just a weaselly politician, while LaTanya Richardson Jackson has riotous fun with Claudine’s overprotectiveness and cunning.
I did find myself, at a recent preview, wishing that Ms. Richardson Jackson had brought just a little more fire to Claudine’s more serious moments, especially a stinging confrontation with Aziza toward the end. In contrast, as Morgan, Alana Arenas, who’s deliciously funny in her earlier scenes, brings an unfussy but harrowing clarity to her character as it becomes plain that Morgan has been exploited by both her husband and her in-laws.
Yet the play’s biggest and most compelling arc in “Purpose” may be the one traveled by Sonny, and the great Harry Lennix charts it with tremendous nuance. This renowned man of God can be as tyrannical and cruel as Tennessee Williams’s Big Daddy, and as corrupt as any number of men who have enjoyed similar statuses in organized religion, politics, or business.
Yet Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins paints Sonny with a grace that the pastor himself has denied others, so that as “Purpose” ends, redemption seems within reach. As Nazareth’s final, stirring monologue reminds us, though, it’s likely most accessible to those who stay humble and keep asking questions, no matter how elusive the answers may seem.
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