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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.
