Why ‘Purpose’ Is the Most Explosive Family Drama on Broadway

“Buckle up,” the character of Nazareth/“Naz” Jasper (John Michael Hill) advises the audience in one of his beautifully written and acted fourth wall-breaking conversations with those watching Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ new Broadway play, Purpose (Hayes Theater, booking to July 6).

Naz’s counsel turns out to be painfully wise. As in Jacobs-Jenkins’ other plays, like the Tony and Obie-winning Appropriate, one thing is for sure: the invective hurled during family confrontations scorches on impact. What a juicily watchable first act of revelation and confrontation Jacobs-Jenkins and director Phylicia Rashad concoct here, of the kind where you’re gasping as much as laughing. Did he/she really just say that? you find yourself thinking over and over again. Yup, they did.

Just as in Appropriate, as well as a family in vivid meltdown, there are deeper questions of legacy, history, inheritance, duty, identity, and responsibility threaded through the domestic chaos—this time with a lauded, successful Black family at its heart.

The firecracker-sharp first act of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company production takes us inside the lavishly appointed Chicago home of the Jasper family (Todd Rosenthal’s striking set is mansion-luxe, including a curved staircase), with a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. pride of place in a domestic gallery of other civil rights leaders. (The Hayes is two-for-two for brilliant stage design after the twinkling seasonality of Cult of Love at Christmas.)

Solomon (Harry Lennix) and Claudine Jasper (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) are figureheads in the movement (he a pastor, she the power behind the altar), with an older son, Junior (Glenn Davis) just released from a minimum-security jail following a sentence served for white-collar crimes. Prosecuted alongside him, his wife Morgan (a standout Alana Arenas, tinderwood-dry in tone, and just as primed to explode) is about to start her jail sentence.

Just intending to stop in to welcome Junior back, younger brother Naz has donated sperm to his friend Aziza Houston (engaging Tony winner Kara Young), who first wants nothing to do with the family or its drama, until she sees who the family is.

Politically and culturally focused, one of the first laugh-out moments of the play sees Aziza silently contemplate her own womb and the possibility she may be carrying the progeny of a “famous Black” family. “You said your daddy was some sort of reverend but not like this kind of reverend! Not like a I-organize-marches reverend!”

“For the record, a turkey baster was the method of choice, brand-spanking-new. Williams Sonoma, for the label whores among you,” Naz turns to tell the audience.

Both he—apparently asexual, not that his family believes this—and Junior are different kinds of disappointments to his family, but both Solomon and Claudine believe that this, anything, can be fixed.

Jacobs-Jenkins brings a number of ingredients to the boil wittily and furiously in this first act: Richardson is excellent as a domineering matriarch, gently and commandingly cajoling everyone does everything her way. She even has an unseen “office” used for persuasion, and goodness knows what else; by the end you are silently screaming for anyone enjoined to join Claudine there to run for the hills.

Junior is the archetypal failson, who has swallowed a media manual on redemption. His gift to his mother is a book of letters she wrote to him when incarcerated; the problem is the one offered up as an example is a fairly quotidian list of things she’s done that day.

Solomon is ashamed of him—not just for being prosecuted, but now for using the family name to redeem himself in such a tacky way, and inveighing around racism and his prison experience his father sees as a particularly insulting calumny.

Solomon himself has recently begun beekeeping, which along with the full-on protective spacesuits and gathering of honey, also chimes with the activist in him around the hive working together for the greater good.

“I just see people out here getting upset about polar bears and pelicans when our people are still being beaten, and caged, and shot down like dogs on the street. To me, that’s the real crisis,” Solomon opines on climate change. (“My father is not a climate denier. Playing devil’s advocate is just like... our love language,” Naz says.)

However, Solomon is hiding secrets of his own that could detonate the family. His secrets are of the kind that would capsize a conventional family, but—as what happens in her private office suggests—Claudine is desperate at all costs for the family to maintain the veneer of iron-plated respectability.

She is, notes Naz, “a walking example of a First Lady, despite my father never having a proper church to First. So my mother very happily turned her home - this home - into a, well, if not exactly a house of God, at least his piéd à terre.”

All the performances ring precisely and heartily. While act two is slower and more schematic than the fizzing first—despite some big dramatic blowouts, it’s a more considered unfolding of the personal and political flowing from the various explosions—we see inscribed in the Jasper family a lived-in politics and history that you can well believe they would fight to keep intact as hard as they must.

After all, as Naz makes clear, his parents lived in the heat of the civil rights movement’s formative years when beatings and injustice were the everyday payoff for fighting for what you believed in.

Action, protection and defense were both his parents’ lifeblood—and the blood they and others spilt. In his most powerful speech to the audience, Naz lays out this history, forged in activism. “They were intimate with pain—especially pain inflicted by one’s fellow man. They knew the quality of rot in the heart that could result from it. The greatest gift they could give their children would be that rot’s opposite.”

This is why Claudine is so paranoid about daughter-in-law Morgan, who Arenas first brings a coiled, silent charisma to, not saying a word and hidden behind dark glasses. Her fabulously volcanic, food-scattering, truth-telling explosion at the dinner table—following Aziza’s declaration of being queer—shows Claudine that both women are what she fears most: something and someone she cannot control. Is Morgan out to kill them? To kill herself? Arenas keeps not just the family on stage, but also the audience at a clever arm’s-length.

As the drama intensifies and subsides, the characters implicitly reveal what “purpose” means to them, including for Aziza and why she decided to become pregnant. This being Jacobs-Jenkins, one intense debate around deeply held beliefs also comes with the probably the loudest laugh of the night, via a bizarre confession that Naz makes which Hill must make genuine sense of to sell to the audience. Despite scattered guffaws, he succeeds, until Solomon brings the house down—saying what anyone guffawing is thinking.

Played for laughs, and played dead-serious, Purpose manages such shifts well, even if the tonal whiplash is extreme. The anchor of the evening becomes Naz’s addresses to the audience, and Hill’s masterful shepherding of those moments of confidence- and intelligence-sharing are both brilliant and vital. Despite all the downed crockery, Purpose is a feast.