Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on His Tony Award-Winning Show “Purpose”

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: All right. We turn now to Broadway where award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins made history at this year’s Tony Awards, becoming the first black playwright since 1987 to win best play for his production, “Purpose.” The plays Kara Young also took home the best featured actress award for her performance. Said in Chicago, the Pulitzer Prize winning drama is a dramedy, is a behind the scenes look at an aging civil rights icons’ household as they navigate complex family dynamics that perhaps many of us can relate to. And Jacobs-Jenkins joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss why he created this work.

 

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins. Thanks so much for joining us. Your play Purpose, which won two of the six Tony Awards that it was nominated for, which won a Pulitzer Prize for drama for folks who were not lucky enough to be able to see it on Broadway, can you give us a digest of what’s, what’s the plot? 

 

BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS: “Purpose” is a kind of family drama in the American mode about two generations of a family that descend on a home to celebrate the homecoming of one of the youngest sons from a period of incarceration. And the parents are both sort of tangential luminaries of the civil rights era. It’s sort of a po – a dynastic family, black political dynastic family. And the youngest son who’s a photographer brings along a friend and hilarity ensues. You know, it’s kind of classic. It’s a classic like, family trapped in a house. It’s a real, but hopefully…

 

SREENIVASAN: Throw in a snowstorm, throw in some generational tension. A bit of sexuality in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: Yes. The themes are broad. Yeah.

 

SREENIVASAN: What, what, what made you want to pick on this kind of a family? Because is this, is this kind of modeled around the Jackson, Jesse Jackson family?

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: Well, it’s, you know, I was very interested in writing a play about kind of a black political dynasty, and there aren’t that many. And there’s a few models that I drew from. I think that the Jacksons seemed to be the most legible to people. But I was really curious about thinking through the legacies of that era, really thinking through the way that the kind of politics and the kind of ideological in some ways and cultural warfare actually comes at a cost and that cost often happens in the family space or the family unit.

I was interested in thinking through sort of the scars and legacies of the mid-20th century as it affected an entire generation of Americans and how that might have trickled down to their kids. You know, really just trying to explore the kind of intergenerational effects of American political life.

 

SREENIVASAN: What is it that people are finding, connecting to? Why is that American family such a kind of interesting vehicle to tell all these other stories?

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been hearing a lot of amazing audience members tell me about how they saw themselves in the family. That ultimately, you know, I think family dramas are like the American pastime after baseball and, you know, we love talk about our families. We love hearing gossip about other families. We make TV shows about families <laugh>. I think it does kind of operate in that, in that world as well, while also kind of touching on these more unique subjects.

I also think that it’s, you know, I wrote this play with the Steppenwolf Theater Company, which is the world’s premier acting ensemble based in Chicago. And they’re just giving like a set of killer performances. You know, five of our six actors were nominated for Tony Awards. One of them won. It’s really like a feast. If you’re into like, seeing some incredible actors go at each other, it’s really, really spectacular, yeah.

 

SREENIVASAN: As I was sitting in the theater. It was interesting to me because you kind of felt like you were a fly on the wall watching, you know, you almost remember kinda like looking in the window, but you could hear in great detail all the stuff that was happening at this dinner table where there’s a really kind of feisty scene. What is it that you wanna expose in these conversations, in these spaces where people are speaking in a way that they don’t think anybody’s listening?

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: Hmm. Yeah. I guess I wanted to explore a lot about this idea of shame in the family and how it operates. You know, that everyone in the family is manipulating or navigating their relationship to shame. And it’s the thing that makes love so difficult, I find, in these familial contexts. And you’re really seeing people who do love each other, kind of hitting their heads again, again, and against this sort of egotistic relationship to something they’re not willing to share, some kind of secret. And that was really the mo, that always, that engine, it is for me, in every scene, especially at the, I mean, the dinner table, which people are really loving, is like, I compared it to like the gladiators into the arena <laugh>. And no one kind of leaves the same, you know? And I think that’s one of the high points for a lot of people in our, of our show.

 

CLIP: FAMILY DRAMA

 

SREENIVASAN: Okay. So let’s take a look at some of these characters one by one. You’ve got Harry Lennix. For the mainstream audience, they might remember his face from a very big TV show called Blacklist. Right. But he’s actually a gifted actor on stage if you’ve never seen him. And he’s kind of the father of this pro, of this, of this family. But he’s a civil rights activist, and he is just got these deep flaws as a father and a husband. But you also do kind of wanna root for him a little bit because you feel, you empathize him trying to get this connection…

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, the thing I’ve discovered being a recent parent myself is you really don’t know what you don’t know. And, you know, you can literally dedicate your life and pour all your love into this small creature you’re keeping alive but they will grow up one day and say, you ruined my life. And that in some ways, that’s Solomon Jasper’s journey is having to sort of wake up to this report card on fathering, and then wanting to actually make good on that and repair that work, but realizing in some ways things it’s too late, you know? And that he has to figure out how to accept his children for who they’ve become. That’s gonna be the most kind of significant act of radical action for him in this space.

And also thinking through, you know, for someone who’s spent their entire life in the trenches fighting for freedom, you know, what does freedom really look like? You know, who get, when your children come up, what do they get to choose their experience of it? You know, that’s kind of one of the more highfalutin philosophical I think he’s having with himself internally.

 

CLIP: MOM – “I DON’T KNOW IF MY SON TOLD YOU…”

 

SREENIVASAN: Claudine Jasper, is played by LaTonya Richards Jackson. She is, you know, in the beginning you’re kinda like, sort of overbearing mom figure, but you realize that,  she’s kind of the glue that’s kept this, this idea of a legacy through hook and by crook alive.

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: Yeah. I mean, I think to me, she embodies a certain idea of the traditional matriarch and what that meant to take that on, not as a lark, but as a calling to believe in the deepest of yourselves that your job is to just keep a family alive and keep it together and be a quiet protector behind the scenes. You know, she really like a lot of the women of this generation, you know, it was a collaboration what they were doing socially, but the male was always the public facing part of it. And what does it mean to wake up in a world where those, those gender dynamics are questioned on the daily <laugh>? You know, we’re looking at women rising to very prominent places in the political system that was just unheard of, you know, and the era that she was growing up in, and her models were being kind of forged in, you know.

 

SREENIVASAN: Naz and Junior are two of the sons, the brothers in this household. Nas played by John Michael Hill, was also the narrator of this play.  (39:34) And you see them kind of struggling with the ripple effects of the same legacy, right. The name that they carry and why, and all the kind of baggage that comes with it, even though, you know, your father was a well-respected civil rights figure.

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: Hmm. Yeah. I think for me, they’re, I mean, they’re very different brothers, right? I, they kind of couldn’t be, you’ve got one brother who doubled down on the legacy and kind of bought the whole thing, hog and all. It’s not even the phrase, but, you know, he he has this father’s name. He tries to like, reenact the kind of steps that his father did.

And then you have this other son who did the opposite. He ran away to become a nature photographer and spent his life in isolation surround in the woods where, you know, rabbits and squirrels don’t know anything about civil rights, right?

And trying to sort of make sense of how these two might belong to the same family is one of the great joys of working this out with these actors. And, you know, for me, I think I’m just trying to explore new versions and iterations of masculinity of, you know, creative life. Again, this idea of like, these children were born in a space where they could kind of take their freedom for granted. And for them, they were both exercising what they felt freedom should be, and have received kind of interesting forms of blowback from the world in which they’ve found themselves.

 

SREENIVASAN: So let me ask – Alana Arenas, she plays Jasper Junior’s wife, Morgan Jasper…  SOUND UP and her character, the premise is very interesting. She’s about to head to prison after her husband got out for financial crimes that he committed. So why design this character in this way what motivated that?

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: Well, I was very inspired by the kind of collateral damage of some of these political crimes, right? And I was specifically interested in tracking through Solomon Jasper Jr. and Morgan, the evolutions of that kind of idea of the traditional marriage that we were talking about, right? She’s definitely not the same kind of wife that her mother-in-law is. And even in the raising of her children, you know, has had different experiences, different language about some of their neurodivergence that she has to navigate. And she really becomes this important kind of counterpoint to the romance that the family has about itself, because in some ways, she feels like an innocent bystander who’s been, who’s been sideswiped, and she comes from a different background, right? In some ways, she grew up enthralled with that family’s mythology. You know, she was the people. She says, like, you know, we were the people you guys are marching for, and I get here and you all feel like criminals. You know, that’s a, it’s a different kind of experience of how tho, that those images of that era ultimately became politics itself, you know, its own kind of bag of tricks. Yeah.

 

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

 

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You said your daddy was some sort of reverend, but not like this kind of reverend, not like a, I organized marches reverend, not like I used to kick it with Rosa Parks reverend, not like an MLK shrine in the living room reverend. Didn’t his son go to jail? Wait, that’s your brother.

 

(END VIDEO CLIP)

 

SREENIVASAN: Kara Young who plays the, the, she’s the actress who won the Tony for best featured actress in a play, and she, her character’s name Aziza Houston. What is the purpose of having her here? I mean, is she kind of the audience, the observer, the outsider coming in? I mean what, what, what, why did you write her in the way you did?

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny. My great, my teacher, great Marsha Norman, she used to say, there’s only two kinds of plays. Either it’s a character going on a journey, or a stranger comes to town, and she’s definitely the stranger who comes to town. You know, I think for me, I was interested in bringing someone on stage who might embody a different idea or a more contemporary idea of what we think of as like black political action in life and that calling. She kind of speaks very vividly about this. She’s also an Easter coast sort of northern born idea of black life that’s sort of showing up to be in contrast to this kind of southern origin, Chicago, Midwest, traditional church bound space. And, you know, she really does become a catalyst for a lot of self-reflection for a lot of folks, you know, but most importantly is her, is her connection to Naz, who is, I mean, this isn’t spoiling anything, but she’s asked Naz to father or sire or her child <laugh> that she wants to carry, which of course, is what creates a lot of interesting political and emotional tension inside the family.

 

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. you know, I wonder if this play, it looks at so many different really kind of personal heavy issues, but what I was kind of surprised by was the amount of laughter in the audience. And I don’t know if you intentionally were trying to plan these kind of comedic lines, or maybe in the previews, or I don’t know where you just said, okay, that actually worked. I didn’t expect that to be a funny line. I thought this was the way I wrote it. The intention was different. Or did the actors bring something that made that funnier?

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: I mean, it’d be funny if I came out here is that I thought I’d written like. Like, why is everyone laughing? You know, I feel for me, I wanna reflect the experience of life, which is full of as much laughter as it is cringing, as it is complaint, as it is pain. And I think laughter for me, in a group is one of the most important phenomenons we have, because, you know, it’s something that you don’t do with a lot of self-consciousness. And yet when you, when you share it with strangers, you’re bonded, you’re connected, you know, you realize that you share some sort of point of view on a situation. And for me, the audience is really a space to kind of unite people and get people to hear each other and trust each other. So I do think that, you know, for me, it, I feel like there’s comic energy in everything I do. But I hope that it’s, you know, one of many kind of emotional states you experience over the course of the evening.

 

SREENIVASAN: So how does a playwright work with a director for someone very outside the theater? And the director of this play is Phylicia Rashad, who, you know, there’s a certain generation, I should say now, of people who would, who would remember her as Claire Huxtable from the Cosby Show, right, and really helped redefine of a different vision of a black family in America through that TV show. But she’s also now a successful director in her own right. But what is, where does the directing start? Where does the playwriting end and how does that go back and forth?

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: Yeah, it really varies from project to project. It’s kind of like a marriage, you know? It’s like not every marriage is gonna give you the same effect, same results. And Phylicia Rashad, I mean, I could believe she said yes when we approached her, ’cause we approached her with like 20 pages of a script. But, you know, not only is she, everyone really know her as Claire Hucktable, which she’s actually one of the most kinda significant theater artists of we’re living today. I mean, she’s the first black woman to win the best actress for Tony, you know, for the, sorry, the Tony Award for best actress, you know, she’s been, she’s the original cast of Dream Girls. She’s the original cast of The Wiz. I mean, she’s touched every single pocket meaningful theater making in this, like, last, you know, last half a century. And she brings all that wisdom and grace and warmth into these rooms.

And she really creates a space of kind of sh of just shameless unselfconscious inspiration and exploring, you know, and which is what we needed. ‘Cause we were really building this play, we were building the plane as we were flying it, right? And the way that she could just like, give the, she’d walk up to an actor and whisper in their ear, and whatever she was whispering, you would get this like, completely different performance. I mean, she’s just a master of the art form. So I think it’s so you, we, five of our six actors being nominated, it’s clearly…

 

SREENIVASAN: Something happened, had something to do with it.

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: …her, you know? Yeah, exactly.

 

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. Yeah. So the whispers work. So I wonder if, you know, do you have a body of work that you are trying, you know, I’m thinking of August Wilson, and the full cycle of plays that he wrote, and really just one after the other different elements of the black experience in America. And last round you know, of the Tony’s your play “Appropriate” won best revival of a play, and that takes place on a plantation in Arkansas with a dysfunctional white family. And I’m wondering whether, you know, these all are pieces that add up to something else that you’re thinking about or have been thinking about? 

 

JACOBS-JENKINS: Yeah, I mean, it is nothing quite as intentional as August Wilson’s project, which is really about sort of reclaiming the 20th century for black American life. But I mean, all my plays do feel connected. And I’ll be honest, that I was thinking a lot about “Purpose” and honestly writing a lot of it while I was in rehearsals for “Appropriate.” Because there is something about, again, family drama is like what we’re good at, you know? And I wanted to see what it would feel like to recast some of those themes and some of those relationships in a different space and different time. And I did write “Appropriate,” you know, about 10, 10, 12 years ago. So I’m a different person now. I have kids, you know, I wanted to sort of get back in the, in the arena with it and see what would happen. But ultimately, I think all of my plays are about thinking through what is American, you know, what is, what is American about drama?

What is American about us, the audiences, you know, trying to challenge our own ideas of what we are versus what we are told we are, what we think we are. And also really exploring the way that things like history and politics, these subjects you can major in, in college actually do have a direct and significant and specific impact on the ways that human beings live their lives and love each other. You know, there’s a relationship between politics and family <laugh>, you know? And what you do inside, at your dinner table is absolutely connected to those headlines and trying to get people to have a sense of ownership over civic life and their role in the, in the polis, if you will. You know? That is there for me.

 

SREENIVASAN: Branden Jacob-Jenkins, the playwright for “Purpose.” Thanks so much for joining us.

JACOBS-JENKINS: Thank you. Such a wonderful time. Thank you so much.