Confusion of Purpose: Branden Jacob-Jenkins' Pulitzer Prize-Winning New Play

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.

Appropriate: The Chaotic American Family

Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin, Michael Esper, Sarah Paulson and Corey Stoll in Appropriate. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

A magnificent cast under Lila Neugebauer’s direction brings Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate to fierce, scrapping life in its Broadway premiere, produced by 2ndStage Theater. The play is the latest entry in the postmodern American family saga sweepstakes, following in the footsteps of such works as Sam Shepard’s Buried Child (1978), Christopher Durang’s The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985) and Tracy Letts’s August Osage County (2007). These plays scramble the conventions of classic American family plays – and there are dozens of those, all circling around Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night – adding elements of satire, parody and knockabout humor as well as anti-realist styles like theatre of the absurd (present in both Buried Child and Bette and Boo) and surrealism. Like Buried Child, Appropriate catapults into surrealism in its final moments, though it also folds in a generous dollop of Southern Gothic. Jacobs-Jenkins has set it on a dilapidated Arkansas plantation after the death of the Lafayette family patriarch, whose three children have gathered on the day of the estate auction. And like Shepard’s play, which it alludes to repeatedly, and also like Bruce Norris’s great Clybourne Park, Appropriate circles around a family secret. The secret isn’t buried in the garden like the corpse of the incest baby in Buried Child or under a tree like the chest belonging to the Korean War vet in Clybourne Park; the Lafayette siblings discover it among their father’s mementos when they clean out the plantation house. It’s a scrapbook of photographs of lynchings that complicates further the legacy of a man who was already difficult in life – irascible, sometimes cruel but also full of contradictions. And at the end of the play we still don’t have a clear picture of him, not just because his children had very different opinions about him but also because the playwright refuses to provide a reliable explanation for the photographs.

Bad Behavior: The Treatment, Gloria, Ink

Aisling Loftus in The Treatment at the Almeida Theatre in London. (Photo: Marc Brenner)

London’s Almeida Theatre revived Martin Crimp’s 1993 play The Treatment in late spring, and I was lucky enough to catch it before it closed. Crimp’s plays are unfamiliar to North Americans, but this is the work of a very gifted playwright – an absurdist comedy roughly in the style of Harold Pinter, but funnier and more sly. Lyndsey Turner’s first-rate production showcased those qualities. In New York City, a young woman named Anne (Aisling Loftus) answers an ad to tell her story to a husband-and-wife producing team (Julian Ovenden and Indira Varma) who are on the lookout for promising film properties. As Anne relates a bizarre tale of a husband who locked her in their apartment, tied her to a chair and gagged her, Jennifer, the female half of the team, adds her own commentary, subtly changing the story to make it more camera-worthy. As the project acquires a screenwriter (Ian Gelder) and a star (Gary Beadle), it undergoes more alterations. Everyone has his or her own take on Anne’s story, including the young intern (Ellora Torchia) in the production company office who winds up playing the leading role in the movie. Eventually we realize that everyone – including Anne – is operating in an entirely self-serving mode, except, ironically, for her notorious husband Simon (Matthew Needham), who is crazy and violent but not toward her, and who is devoted to protecting her from a crazy, violent world. There are no reliable versions of the narrative; everything’s up for grabs, including the truth about whether Anne or Simon is the controlling figure in their marriage. Turner had an excellent cast, including Ben Onwukwe as a blind cab driver and Hara Yannas, doubling as a waitress and a madwoman; Varma, memorable as Ann in the Simon Godwin’s production of Man and Superman at the National, was the standout.