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| Jon Michael Hill and Harry Lennix in Purpose. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.) |
I’m a fan of the African-American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, but he strikes out with his latest work to hit Broadway, Purpose. It’s another dysfunctional family play, like his last-season hit Appropriate. That one was about a nutty white family coming to terms with apparent evidence that the recently deceased patriarch was an especially baroque brand of racist: he collected photographs of lynchings. In Purpose the family is Black, and not just Black – they belong to an aristocracy distinguished by political celebrity. Solomon (known as Sonny) Jasper (played by Harry Lennix) is a minister and Civil Rights activist who was a close confederate of Martin Luther King, whose portrait hangs on the living-room wall, and Jacobs-Jenkins borrows some of King’s personal details for the character. Sonny’s wife Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) is a lawyer, fiercely protective of her family and its legacy. Their elder brother Junior (Glenn Davis), a politician, has just finished a two-year prison stint for the misuse of campaign funds and other white-collar crimes, and his wife Morgan (Alana Arenas), is about to follow him into jail as an accomplice, though she claims that she had no idea what she was signing her name to, and possibly she’s telling the truth. These consecutive sentences are the result of a negotiation with the justice system, so that their kids wouldn’t be left without a parent to take care of them. Junior’s kid brother Naz (Jon Michael Hill) has kept himself distanced from the family: he lives in Harlem while they’re in another state (the playwright doesn’t tell us where the Jaspers live, but Chicago is a good guess), and he hasn’t even kept them apprised of his career as a photographer. The occasion for the family gathering is a delayed birthday celebration for Claudine. The unexpected guest is Naz’s friend Aziza (Kara Young), a single gay woman for whom Naz has offered to serve as a sperm donor. He’s carefully hidden his family background from her, so when she stumbles into the lush Jasper home she’s stunned to discover that he’s the progeny of one of the most famous Black families in the country.
The Jaspers occupy a stratum of Black America that rarely makes it into either drama or movies, so even though the first act is basically a sitcom our expectations for a gossipy, entertaining evening at the theatre remain high. But the second act is a major letdown. The material is juicy, but the play isn’t wild enough – not the complaint I anticipated leveling the author of An Octoroon, Gloria and Appropriate. Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t let himself go as a satirist here; he’s constantly pulling his punches by arguing that there’s a sympathetic way to view the characters’ scandalous actions. It’s as if Molière had written a play in which he kept slipping in psychological justification for the most venal, selfish behavior of his over-the-top caricatures. Purpose keeps falling into special pleading, and it feels schizoid. Without reading the script I can only guess, but I suspect that the problems with the play itself are exacerbated by Phylicia Rashad’s tentative, superficial direction.
Rashad certainly handles the talented cast well, however. Almost all the actors are good, especially Davis and Lennix. The exception is Hill, whom I used to enjoy as the cop who let Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson solve his cases on the TV show Elementary. He was a nifty straight man on that series, but he’s struggling in Purpose because the play sabotages him. He doesn’t just play Naz; he also has the impossible role of the narrator who keeps turning to the audience to provide Brechtian commentary, which often explicates what is already perfectly clear. Jacobs-Jenkins does Hill no favors: these intrusions are easily the flattest, most banal pieces of writing in the script. And Amith Chandrashaker, the lighting designer, signals each one with a stark swing away from realism that becomes tedious. The production is clunky while the play goes on too long, as Jacobs-Jenkins piles on more and more text in what increasingly feels like a last-ditch effort to make the apparatus work. It has the opposite effect: by the end of the three-hour performance you’re not sure what you just saw.
– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.
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