Technically speaking, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ new play Purpose isn’t about a dysfunctional family reuniting for the holidays and revealing various fractures and secrets in their relationships – not the holiday part, anyway.
The Jasper family, led by prominent Black activist Solomon Jasper (Harry Lennix), is getting together in Chicago under far less superficially merry circumstances: yes, it’s a relief that older son Junior (Glenn Davis) has recently been released from prison following time served for a campaign-fraud conviction, but his wife, Morgan (Alana Arenas), is about to begin her own sentence for her role in these crimes, understandably bitter about where her loyalties have landed her. The couple was allowed to serve consecutively in light of their having young children – whose absence from this gathering bothers willful matriarch Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) to no end, especially because it’s nominally a celebration of her weeks-earlier birthday. The show’s narrator, withdrawn younger son Nazareth (Jon Michael Hill), accidentally provides the token outsider via his friend Aziza (Kara Young), who volunteers to drive him after he misses his flight.
Jacobs-Jenkins and director Phylicia Rashad seem aware of the home-for-the-holidays trappings of his story, adding little touches that evoke that spirit and its evasiveness here, like one character enthusing over food-prep that makes it feel like “Thanksgiving came early” and an impending snowstorm that winds up keeping Aziza at the Jasper household overnight. Not being sure when, exactly, this not-quite-holiday story is taking place (October? February?) adds a clever sense of displacement to the proceedings, exacerbating the suspicion that whatever familial togetherness the Jaspers are looking for may be forced, rather than naturally embraced.
Purpose has a lot more off-kilter awkwardness where this came from, not always so productive. A sprawling work despite taking place over less than 24 hours, the play is absolutely packed with monologues, speeches and recriminations, even before it gets to the centerpiece dinner-table blow-up that inevitably concludes its first act. (The speechifying doesn’t let up in the second act, either.) The Solomon character is clearly inspired by Jesse Jackson: a man of God and civil rights speaker whose prominence peaked in the 1980s and whose son was later convicted of campaign fraud. So it’s natural that Purpose would address its themes – the pressures of Black excellence, the crushing nature of familial expectations that come without actual instruction, and the stigma of mental illness, among other topics – with a whole lot of oratorical flair. Davis, Jackson, Lennix and Arenas all get a chance to thunder at each other, and even the less confrontational moments feature torrents of words.
There’s so much of this direct-address material that its effectiveness can vary wildly from moment to moment. At the outset, it’s helpful scene-setting, and once the family sparks start to fly, Hill manages some quick asides that bring the house down. But Jacobs-Jenkins also uses Nazareth’s soliloquies to explain character motivations, fill in brief time jumps, underline themes, and sometimes just flat-out describe scenes that aren’t actually dramatized. If this self-interrupting technique functioned as a running commentary more consistently, it might feel like a subversion of familiar melodrama. Instead, these moments often bear so much weight that they come across like a hasty solution to writing problems that Jacobs-Jenkins couldn’t quite crack.
In a preview performance, the actors seemed to bear some of that burden. Hill, forced to begin the whole show with paragraphs of speech, was the first to flub a line, but he wasn’t the last or only one; good as the cast is, almost everyone stumbled verbally at some point, suggesting that the text itself might need some further smoothing out. The one performer who deftly avoids the dramaturgical awkwardness is Young, a recent Tony winner for the terrific revival of Purlie Victorious. Aziza could have been a simple audience surrogate, but Young plays her with an expansive skill set: her comic surprise at learning who Nazareth’s family is (and has been, as she says, “this whole time”, turning a simple observation into a punchline); the believable physical comedy of her recalling the lineup of Black heroes that adorned her elementary school wall alongside Solomon’s portrait; the rush of nervous emotion when she defends Nazareth’s sexual identity during dinner. She can turn on a dime from broadly hilarious to subtly devastating, a true dynamo. Davis is another cast standout as he swings from political blowhard to schemer to wreck.
All of those swings and pivots lend the show an entertaining boldness. It’s certainly cathartic to see a work so unafraid to go big and risk bad laughs by letting serious strife spill over into farce. Yet there’s something dramatically strenuous about the sheer tonnage Jacobs-Jenkins packs into these two and a half hours. The repeated pauses for Nazareth’s addresses reflect that, refusing to let the material breathe, almost as if fearful of leaving something out – or even simply leaving things unsaid. And for all the show’s muchness, it ends on a moment that feels both delicately ambiguous and vaguely unearned. Its title suggests a singularity of motivation that the play, for better and worse, never comes close to evoking – or achieving.
