Purpose Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Director Phylicia Rashad on Rethinking the American Family Drama
(Photo: Marc J. Franklin)
In December 2023, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins made his Broadway debut with Appropriate—a family drama laced with dark comedy about the gruesome secrets rotting away on a neglected Arkansas plantation. At the time, Jacobs-Jenkins was already a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a MacArthur Fellow and regular presence on off-Broadway and regional stages. Broadway was really just a fun box to tick.
“I'm under no delusions that this means I'm suddenly a Broadway playwright,” he told Broadway.com just before the show’s opening night. “I'm still going to probably do my next play in a little basement downtown.”
(Photo: Marc J. Franklin)
Surely, more downtown basements are in his future, but the now-Tony-winning playwright (Appropriate won the award for Best Revival of a Play) can’t ignore how quickly he’s boomeranged back to Broadway with another ensemble family play, Purpose, directed by two-time Tony Award-winning actress Phylicia Rashad.
“I was finishing this play while rehearsing Appropriate,” Jacobs-Jenkins said to Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens on The Broadway Show, Rashad sitting beside him. “They are conjoined on some level. If you’ve seen Appropriate, there are echoes—intentional echoes that you might hear.”
While Appropriate dredged up the muck of a white family’s part in America’s racist past (and present), Purpose follows the Jaspers, a family of Black community leaders—preachers, politicians, civil rights activists. The actors comprising this family unit are Tony Award nominee LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix, Jon Michael Hill, Glenn Davis and Alana Arenas, with Tony Award winner Kara Young taking on the role of the outsider who shifts the delicate domestic dynamic. “I’m just interested in family stories,” said Jacobs-Jenkins. “It’s really about honoring what I think is truly the most American form of drama—which is the family drama—and finding new ways to tell it.”
“He'll write the familiar in the most unfamiliar way,” said Rashad, who directed Purpose at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre last spring and now brings the play to New York in her Broadway directorial debut. “His writing is everything that life is. And as we know, life makes the best theater.”
Watch the full interview in the video below.
