Theatre in Review: Purpose (Helen Hayes Theater)

	Jon Michael Hill, Kara Young, Harry Lennix. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

With recent tenants like Between Riverside and Crazy, Appropriate, Mother Play, and Cult of Love, the Hayes Theater has become Broadway's official House of Family Dysfunctions. Purpose continues this tradition in style, even if playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins hasn't quite matched his work on last-seasons electricity-generating Appropriate. With their one-word titles and symphonic displays of neuroses, it's fair to see them as a matched set of heritage plays, however: Appropriate focuses on a once-prominent (and slave-holding) Arkansas family struggling to get out from under its racist past. The household in Purpose is unmoored by the passing of the Civil Rights Era, haunted by its past achievements, and saddled with a flailing, aimless younger generation. Like Bess Wohl's currently running Liberation, the play wants to know: How did we ever end up here?

Purpose unfolds in the home of Reverend Solomon Jasper, an intimate of Martin Luther King -- check out the shrine to the great man on the first floor of Todd Rosenthal's intensively detailed set -- and a movement figurehead who, advocating for justice, has endured controversies, beatings, and prison stays. Now in his eighties, he is withdrawn and bitter, filling his days with beekeeping and acid comments on his disappointing offspring. His wife, Claudine, who subsumed her law career for "the professional work of the matriarch," is the guardian of the castle, the keeper of the family's secrets, bent on polishing a facade of excellence and harmony for the world to admire. Good luck with that project: One son, Junior, a former state senator convicted of embezzling campaign funds, is just out of jail. His wife and unwitting accomplice, Morgan, is about to serve her sentence, a kind judge having ruled that their children should only have one locked-up parent at a time. Then there's younger song Nazareth, a nature photographer, whose loner status raises plenty of questions among his loved ones. He shows up, purely by accident, with his dear friend Aziza, who is queer and has enlisted Nazareth as the potential turkey-baster father of her baby.

That last point, a no-strings-attached arrangement without parental responsibilities, is one of many highlights of an incendiary family meal, the likes of which Broadway hasn't seen since August: Osage Country. It's a three-course menu of salacious tidbits involving mental illness, infidelity, and fraud. The after-dinner digestifs include the threat of a tell-all memoir, a sinister stash of pills, and a suicide attempt. Visiting with the Jasper family, you get your money's worth of scandal.

Much of Purpose carpet-bombs the stage with shockers, guaranteeing a lusty audience response, but it would benefit from stronger direction than Phylicia Rashad has provided. For one thing, that all-important family dinner is staged at a circular table, meaning that one's view of the actors is often blocked; it's awkward to hear key revelations from actors one can't see. Nor has Rashad found a way around some of the play's more awkward aspects, about which more in a moment.

Still, she has an accomplished cast at her command. As Solomon, Harry Lennix, prowls the stage, scowling in disapproval at the young men he has spawned. (The Solomons bear at least a superficial resemblance to Jesse Jackson's family.) Fed up with Junior trying to reframe himself as a political prisoner, he roars, "I don't know if I am going to sit here and have you acting like you're some sort of Nelson Mandela when Nelson Mandela sat in that exact chair." Mocking Junior's attempt at packaging his mother's letters to him in prison as an inspirational bestseller, he reads a typical excerpt -- "Dear Son, I am missing you today. I went to the Whole Foods and did some gardening. The Wilsons are coming over, who send their love. We are going to see the Barbie movie," -- then sarcastically murmurs, "Powerful." (With a single word, Junior is stripped bare of his pretensions.) He thunderingly announces that it is past time for the family to live with the truth, but, confronted with evidence of an illegitimate child, he quietly allows, "There could be one. There could be none. There could be many," adding, "And that's my cross to bear, alright?" Lennix makes Solomon an intriguing mix of saint and sinner, prophet and profligate, and you cross him at your peril.

LaTanya Richardson Jackson barrels around as the family's matriarch and brand manager, barraging her children with intrusive questions -- "Do we bite? Do we judge?," she asks, apparently unaware that the answer in both cases is yes -- and rolling out legal documents at the slightest hint of irregular behavior. Learning about Nazareth and Aziza's child conception scheme, she almost immediately produces an NDA for Aziza to sign; indeed, it's only a letter of agreement, a prelude to a much longer document, packed with protections for the Jaspers. And her constant, casual disregard for daughter-in-law Morgan leads to physical contretemps at the dinner table.

Kara Young's Aziza is an innocent and truth-teller among wolves, initially thrilled to be in the presence of Black political royalty. (The taciturn Nazareth failed to inform her about his background.) In one of the evening's biggest laughs, she discreetly gazes down at her vaginal area, amazed that the child she may be carrying would be part of a historic lineage. After a few hours with this crew, however, she is counseling Nazareth to flee this toxic atmosphere and reviewing her motherhood plans. She also makes something effective out of Aziza's memories of participating in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer of 2020. It's one of the play's most supreme ironies: Among so many characters woefully lacking in the title quality, Aziza may be the real heir to Solomon and Claudine's legacy of meaningful action.

Glenn Davis' Junior is a basket case in the making, desperate to erase the shame of his incarceration, forever trying (and failing) to please his father. (His disastrous attempt at aping Solomon's beekeeping is only the most devastating example.) At his wits' end with Morgan, he passively ignores what he sees as her suicidal behavior, hoping to quietly get rid of her, justifying it as an act of mercy. Little does he know that Morgan is the most devious character onstage, rendered with bracing honesty by Alana Arenas. In the play's most scalding passage -- and that's saying something -- she furiously recalls how, the daughter of a housemaid, she was scooped up by Junior, their marriage designed to be an uplifting parable of social redemption. She warns about the dangers of "being all dazzled by all the Symbolic Blackness before you -- so blinded by the Black Excellence, Black Power, Black Righteousness you can't see the old man standing there in front you just scratching his ass."

The master of ceremonies at this family circus is Nazareth, giving Jon Michael Hall the most stage time and the most challenging assignment. He is both a participant and (sometimes unreliable) narrator, often interrupting the action for such lengthy bouts of exposition that one begins to wonder if Purpose is a play or a novel in disguise. Nazareth is also asexual, an assertion nobody else is buying; this cues elaborate explanations that are rather pallid next to all the surrounding dramatic fireworks. Everybody in Purpose wants something except for Nazareth, who only wants to be left alone; despite Hall's first-rate work, the character is a drag on the action, a playwright's device rather than a fully realized player in the family drama.

Still, the laughs are plentiful, the insights are usually searing, and the dish is piping hot. Rosenthal's set is a kind of museum of Solomon's career, attractive, imposing, and icily formal. Amith Chandrashaker's lighting tracks the time of day and weather conditions, seen through the windows, with admirable accuracy. Dede Ayite's costumes -- including Solomon's tracksuit, Claudine's elaborate pantsuit ensemble, and the casual wear favored by Nazareth and Aziza -- are trenchant character studies. Sound designers Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen provide discreet amplification along with such key effects as thunder and gunshots.

If Purpose isn't as taut and well-constructed as Appropriate, it provides a similarly revivifying blast of cold honesty. Having outlived a movement or arrived too late, his characters urgently need a new way of living, a vision of the future that frees them from being held hostage to the past. In both plays, Jacobs-Jenkins' message is clear and direct: America is a dysfunctional family, and it is long past time we owned up to it. --David Barbour