Purpose Broadway Reviews

This family, as Aziza realizes too late to escape, is off the rails. That’s exciting while the story remains in midair in Act 1, less so upon landing in a heap in Act 2. By then the dials set for bright comedy are stuck way too high for serious retribution; Solomon especially behaves so abominably that the playwright’s attempt to rehabilitate him cannot succeed.

A whirlwind of a play, the cast delivers incredible performances and seems at ease in this world cultivated by Jacobs-Jenkins and structured by Rashad. The play acknowledges how much our families and our places within them shape, define and break us. ‘Purpose’ is a brilliant and profound narrative about legacies, ambition, mental illness and who you may become if you were never allowed to know yourself.

Jacobs-Jenkins has already piled other developments on his plate. In the second act, stretching across a long dark and winter night—maybe the Hayes simply re-upped their lease on the snow machine from Cult of Love—he doles out more family secrets: pills, affair allegations, a gun (hi, Chekhov!). These intensify things toward melodrama but prove harder for both the actors and the play itself to metabolize. (There’s barely space for a whole other thread involving neurodivergence.) It’s only when the playwright has already brought the action to its conclusion that Jacobs-Jenkins gets most comfortable. In a long coda between Nazareth and Solomon, he reckons with faith, beekeeping, solitude, and purpose itself (the play’s title is in part a reference to Adolph Reed’s book on Jackson’s presidential campaign). There, themes previously constricted by plot flow more freely, as if Jacobs-Jenkins is getting to a backlog of notes after the fact.

Although it runs an hour and a quarter, the first act of ‘Purpose’ flies by, aloft on Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s sharp wit and astute delineation of the barely hidden conflicts among the characters, even if some of the revelations that pop up like unwanted birthday gifts are predictable.

Purpose is a big swing, but that’s what it takes to get a big hit. Jacobs-Jenkins’s breakthrough play, An Octoroon, was a rejection of old theatrical conventions. This one takes a seat at the table, where—rising to the occasion—it makes speeches, makes trouble and makes excellent theater.

Through the course of this three-hour play, she is all these people plus a few more, and Richardson Jackson achieves these many mercurial changes by simply adjusting the temperature of her voice. Hers is a masterful performance.

Director Phylicia Rashad has assembled an A-plus cast and lays on thunderous sound effects for gravity. To quibble, Naz works overtime to narrate the goings-on — mileage varies on that device — and his final speech, though beautiful, comes a bit out of the blue.

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.

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.

With its dynastic family headed by a patriarch who finds a late-in-life distaste for mendacity, Jacobs-Jenkins seems to be not just riffing on Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but grounding it at a fascinating historical crossroads for Black Americans; a sort of impasse between a modern sense that the storied Civil Rights era’s respectability has badly ossified and a contemporary moral anarchy during which 'young people these days,' as Solomon points out, are nevertheless 'too obsessed with being history, making history.'

Time has passed Rev. Jasper by. Aged out of relevance, with the vigorous civil rights movement a thing of history, he sees his legacy in ashes, with one son a convicted felon and the other a divinity school dropout. This lion in winter retreats to the passions and pursuits of an earlier day, notably beekeeping (a dramatically interesting choice, as it turns out). Lennix is a marvel in this role, fires banked but still burning. Though he almost never raises his voice, we never question his authority, however disillusioned he’s become.

Jacobs-Jenkins is a fantastic storyteller, and it is possible to walk away from Purpose without considering any of the play’s further implications, simply having relished in his almost unparalleled gifts for dialogue and characterization. (It won’t be a surprise if he ends up with back-to-back Tony Awards.)

The results afflict everyone, many if not most of them beginning or ending with Solomon’s iron grip over the family, with Aziza dragged into the fray. The patriarch resents both his sons: Naz turned his back on becoming the celebrated next-generation preacher; Junior went bad and is deemed unworthy of redemption. On it goes, for a while making sense of the family’s accumulating dysfunctions and crescendoing toward a delicately plotted finale. But Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t know when to stop. He continues piling on nasty disturbances and ugly revelations so that he haphazardly risks audience resistance.

Rashad, a longtime Broadway performer and accomplished director, does excellent work with the actors and with navigating quicksilver vacillations in tone. Moments of real uncertainly — when it seems that just about anything could happen next — are a rare and wonderful feat. If a bit of patience is required in return, call it a fair trade.

Pulling it all together is Rashad, who directs her excellent cast with insight and nuance, no false moves from beginning to end. The play doesn’t pretend to answer all the lofty questions it raises – how could it? Finding purpose is an elusive and difficult endeavor, and Jacobs-Jenkins has fashioned a play that, more than anything, embraces the search.

Played for laughs, and played dead-serious, Purpose manages such shifts well, even if the tonal whiplash is extreme. The anchor of the evening becomes Naz’s addresses to the audience, and Hill’s masterful shepherding of those moments of confidence- and intelligence-sharing are both brilliant and vital. Despite all the downed crockery, Purpose is a feast.

“Purpose” toggles between the old and new — be it in discussions about political sacrifice, queerness or parenthood. This tension is so essential that designer Todd Rosenthal builds it into his set: a nod to classic architecture and proverbial Afrocentric homeyness accented with contemporary touches of recessed lighting and a trendy bouclé couch. This production has officially mastered the balance of distilling complex, intergenerational conflict into accessible, modern drama. And though many are the plays that have tried, it is “Purpose” that prevails. Brittani Samuel March 18, 2025 . 12:46 AM 9 min read Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Share via Email

I howled all the way through Jacobs-Jenkins’ clever and venomous spin on the story: This particular bombshell-littered house belongs to the Jaspers, a powerful black political dynasty whose controversies and scandals come down faster than the blizzard outside their window. If your family is anything like them, I’d recommend emancipation.

With his latest effort, “Purpose,” the playwright does more than maintain his momentum: He secures his place as Broadway’s most incisive and scathingly entertaining chronicler of family and social dysfunction — an inheritor to American giants stretching from Eugene O’Neill to Tracy Letts, but with a voice and perspective that are distinctly of this moment.

Purpose might surprise Jacobs-Jenkins diehards in its relatively straightforward melodramatic structure and earnest undercurrents, but the language inspires and, as one character says, “really works its way inside you.” As the weekend unravels, taking wild turns that neither Nazareth nor Aziza could have imagined, the way the Jaspers talk to each other and about themselves becomes more heartbreaking. Their terse exchanges and angry tirades are searching, almost desperate pleas for direction and mutual understanding. They sound like monologues at the end of The Comeuppance, when audiences commune with death and, in the midst of a pandemic, grapple with what it means to die. In Purpose, Jacobs-Jenkins asks us to confront what it means to live.

Thankfully, the extended gestation also means that Rashad's production comes to New York from Chicago with much of its superb Steppenwolf cast intact. (Only Young and Jackson are new additions.) Every actor gets an aria-like monologue, which throws off the play's rhythm, but at least each one is a bravura showpiece. Perhaps that's where the real promise of Purpose in the idea that somehow every member of a family (or of a movement) can be sustained by our attention, rather than our worship. So much precious energy is wasted on building people into icons and tearing them down. Can there be a form of recognition that avoids celebrity? Steppenwolf's own ensemble model shows the way.