NEW YORK — Nobody but Branden Jacobs-Jenkins could have written Steppenwolf Theatre’s blistering play “Purpose,” now reintroducing Chicago’s most famous theater to Broadway.
No one else would have had the chutzpah or the clout to so eviscerate a powerful, theocratic Black family and, in so doing, to chart the price that political parents invariably extract from their kids, children who did not sign up for any kind of campaign and to whom no benefits accrue. Just pressure and angst from listening to a lifetime of moralization and pontification and hypocrisy.
Commissioned by Steppenwolf, where it premiered last year, “Purpose” could reasonably be described as a Black version of the Steppenwolf play “August: Osage County” (or the Black version of that famous Italian dinner scene in the Chicago-set TV show “The Bear.”)
Directed in New York and Chicago by Phylicia Rashad, “Purpose” is all the more powerful for its sly, barely fictionalized references to a specific family, that of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose son, former congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., was busted in 2013 for violating federal campaign law by using campaign funds to make personal purchases and sent to jail. His wife (now ex-wife) Sandi Jackson was sent to jail, too, on the inarguably flimsy grounds of jointly filing a fraudulent tax return. In a novel concession to the couple having young children, a judge allowed the two to serve their sentences sequentially.
To be clear, “Purpose” is about a fictional family named the Jaspers (LOL), but it takes place just as “Junior” Jasper (Steppenwolf co-artistic director Glenn Davis) has gotten out of jail and wife Morgan (Alana Arenas) is about to enter federal prison. In the Broadway version of the script, some of the juicier Jacksonian references are less evident than was the case in Chicago, but there’s still little doubt where Jacobs-Jenkins got the idea.
“Purpose” becomes another entry in Steppenwolf’s long ledger of potent plays wherein damaged young storytellers, trying to find the point of their own lives, take their revenge against self-absorbed, transactional baby boomers, all bull, blather and blarney. And the piece is acted in this Broadway transfer with all ensemble guns blazing, replete with deeply immersive performances from Latanya Richardson Jackson (who is new to the show), Harry Lennix, Kara Young (also new) and, playing the authorial alter ego, the Steppenwolf ensemble member Jon Michael Hill.
Anyone who has real-life experience with such a circle-the-wagons family will tell you that it’s the outsiders drawn in by marriage who have the hardest time. So it’s apt that the breakout performance here comes from Arenas, the longtime Steppenwolf ensemble member who is on fire from the moment she walks out on the stage of the Hayes Theater, her character so infuriated by the actions of her husband, and so aware of what familial forces made him this way, she can barely contain the roar of her sardonic rage. This is one of those tours de force where the audience collectively leans forward the second she enters Todd Rosenthal’s re-creation of a big house on Chicago’s South Side with portraits of civil rights icons like Martin Luther King, Jr. on the walls, men who also once walked its halls.
Hill’s Naz Jasper, like Tom in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” talks directly to the audience as he returns to his family homestead with his friend Aziza (the live-wire Young), to whom he has donated his sperm, an action he knows his parents are destined not to understand. At first, Aziza is star-struck by being in the home of a civil rights icon, but over dinner she sees that Solomon Jasper (Lennix) has been a better marcher for social justice than a parent and husband, and that his wife, Claudine (Richardson Jackson) has learned that her job is to clear up the mess with nondisclosures and the like.
Hill is a deeply empathetic actor and his character pulls the audience through this story by the hand, revealing a now-struggling Solomon and an unstable family trapped in the deepest form of denial. Jacobs-Jenkins has penned Naz as an asexual introvert, the kind of young man who fin
ds solace in nature and lakes and everything that takes him far away from either his father’s infidelity or the glare of political attention. It’s a remarkably moving character, likely all too familiar to all scions of big personalities with even bigger flaws. And it’s rendered beautifully by one of Steppenwolf’s young stars.
“Purpose” runs out of steam a little late in the second act, where Lennix could, to my mind, fight with yet more force as Solomon makes his generation’s case to his needy younger son, insisting on his continuing relevance even as the world spirals away. But that’s a minor quibble, given Lennix’s overall sad gravitas, the power of this ensemble acting, the merciless direction throughout and the fantastic way Jacobs-Jenkins goes back and forth between his characters’ anger and vulnerability, making the case for everyone and undermining all their arguments at the same time.
In the end, “Purpose” is a major new American play about what it’s like to be trapped by powerful parents whose public personas their children can easily see through, even as they are condemned to try and live up to their import. A thumping blend of tragic-proximate horror and schadenfreude, it’s riveting to watch.
