An American Family Finding Its PURPOSE — Review

After setting the dramatic world ablaze last season with Appropriate, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins returns to Broadway with another lacerating look at familial heritage. Purpose, a handsome Steppenwolf production sharply directed by Phylicia Rashad, follows a fraught reunion at the Chicago home of a Black civil rights hero. Each performance is exquisitely tuned, and though its second act spends too long on the reverberations of its perfect first, this is drama at its finest.

Nazareth (Jon Michael Hill, an impressive ensemble nexus), the creative black sheep of the Jasper clan, narrates his return home for the delayed birthday celebrations of his mother, Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), a fierce lady whose law degree has gone largely unused in favor of the front-facing duty of public matriarchy. Her party’s been postponed to accommodate a brief gap between prison time served by her eldest son, state senator Junior (Glenn Davis), and his wife, Morgan (Alana Arenas), who have been jointly convicted of fraud but allowed to carry out separately so as to not disrupt childcare. This has obviously annoyed the family patriarch, Solomon (Harry Lennix), a longtime activist and preacher; the kind someone like Nazareth’s friend Aziza (Kara Young) – who, unaware of his lineage, just enlisted his help conceiving a child before dropping into the festivities – would have seen alongside portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the walls of her Harlem elementary school.

The family’s spacious living room (Todd Rosenthal makes the absolute most of the Hayes’ small stage) can hardly contain the size of the turmoil Jacobs-Jenkins conceives for them, or of the performances which rise to meet them while honoring every chance for minute detail. In a perfect union of actor and character annihilating their intended audience (we in the real world; the Jaspers in the play), Arenas plays an emotional outburst of her character’s fabulously. The smaller bits, like the way family members warily test Aziza’s name out on their mouths, land just as eloquently.

With its dynastic family headed by a patriarch who finds a late-in-life distaste for mendacity, Jacobs-Jenkins seems to be not just riffing on Tennesee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but grounding it at a fascinating historical crossroads for Black Americans; a sort of impasse between a modern sense that the storied Civil Rights era’s respectability has badly ossified and a contemporary moral anarchy during which “young people these days,” as Solomon points out, are nevertheless “too obsessed with being history, making history.” It’s a fascinating treatise on respectability, conservatism, preservation and legacy which, in Jacobs-Jenkins fashion, is also an enthralling drama which draws the most biting comedic blood from its human tragedy.

‍Purpose is in performance at the Hayes Theatre on West 44th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.