A civil rights leader’s family airs its dirty laundry on Broadway in ‘Purpose’

Purpose, a new play now on Broadway, has all the trappings of the classic family drama: A powerful and aging patriarch, wayward sons, a strategizing wife and a watchful outsider. It could be about monarchs.

Instead, the latest work from Tony-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins trains its lens on a Black family with deep roots in the American civil rights movement grappling with the impact of that very history on them and on society at large.

“I was interested in this common phenomenon I was seeing historically within two generations, a kind of reversal of fortune happening, specifically as it pertained to Black political families,” Jacobs-Jenkins told NPR’s Michel Martin.

The production, directed by award-winning actor Phylicia Rashad, is funny, challenging and even disturbing in turns. During a preview performance, the audience responded with a mixture of shock and awe, bursting out laughing at some points, gasping at others, or whispering “amen” and “that’s right.”

Purpose dives head on into the hypocrisy of a family led by a a highly imperfect religious-political leader. The Jasper family is not unlike that of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, though Jacobs-Jenkins is wary of drawing parallels. Headed by aging patriarch Solomon, or “Sonny” (Harry Lennix), with his wife Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) by his side, the Jaspers gather to celebrate the release of eldest son Junior (Glenn Davis) from prison before his wife, Morgan (Alana Arenas), must serve her own sentence.

A younger son, Nazareth (Jon Michael Hill), is a disappointment to his family for other reasons, but serves as an empathetic and knowing narrator to the drama over what happened and why and how the family should go forward. Scheming, manipulation and exploitation are on the menu of what quickly becomes an explosive family dinner fueled by the parents’ disapproval of their sons’ life choices and a shocking revelation brought by visitor Aziza (Kara Young).

A slap, a non-disclosure agreement and heaps of disapproval follow, with the parents shown to be just as conniving as they’ve been celebrated in the past for their civil rights achievements.

“One of the struggles with being a Black American in this culture is so much work is done culturally to police what you’re allowed to feel,” Jacobs-Jenkins said. “Why not humanize these superhumans? We don’t need to be the purest souls on the planet to speak up in the face of injustice, because injustice has nothing to do sometimes with what I’m doing in my own house. Or maybe it does.”

The entire play is set inside the Jasper living room/dining room, which has as its centerpiece a giant and almost smirking portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“This is really what it is: in a family, the patriarch of iconic status, and how does a successive generation find their purpose?” said Rashad. “The problem is they don’t have something to coalesce around. They don’t have a civil rights movement to coalesce around. So what do we have?”

Rashad directed the play after decades on stage herself in theater — including in A Raisin in the Sun and Gem of the Ocean — and television, where she’s best known for her turn as Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show.

“Some of the best theater is family drama,” she said. “You’re looking at people as we live, and that’s what theater does. And to have it so well-written with twists and turns and surprises that come, you never get ahead of yourself by reading it, you never get ahead of yourself while watching it.”

Rashad first joined the production ahead of its premiere run in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company last year. When she signed on, the second act wasn’t even written yet, so she worked closely with Jacobs-Jenkins in bringing the play to the stage.

“Everything begins with the script… and in reading the text, wanting to discern the playwright’s intention, because that’s everything,” Rashad explained. “If you don’t understand that, you’re just superimposing thoughts and ideas on something, and you never get to the heart of what was offered to you.” It’s only after she’s read the text several times that Rashad said she begins working with the actors.

Rashad, who made her directorial debut in 2007 with the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s production of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, says she closely observes each individual actor’s way of expressing themselves through their voice and body to help guide the interpretation of the play.

Her approach involves “a lot of problem solving, and also discerning the actors’ language,” she added. “Actually, many things that occur to me in directing a play occur to me from what I see an actor do.”

Directing, for Rashad, is about “holding a creative vision and galvanizing all the creative energies, the designers, the actors, the crew — everybody — galvanizing all of the energies to move in alignment with a vision while leaving space for them to contribute what I did not see.”

Jacobs-Jenkins said he wrote Purpose, which runs through July 6, while rehearsing in 2023 the revival of his play Appropriate, which earned him a Tony a decade after that work was originally premiered. He sees the pair as cousins of sorts. Appropriate featured an all-white cast exploring the legacy of a family’s former plantation home.

“My great occupation creatively is the way forces of history shape emotional relationships and psychologies and people,” he said, pointing to how his parents benefited from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that sought to provide better educational opportunities for disadvantaged students.

“I’ve always believed that it’s okay to acknowledge that race is a part of how we analyze in the world, for better or for worse.”

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Barry Gordemer. The digital version was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi.