Mickey Jo (0:00)

Who is writing the next Cat in a Hot Tin Roof? Who is reimagining the great American family drama for today? The answer is Brandon Jacobs Jenkins. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you're listening on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I'm a professional theatre critic here on social media and not too long ago I went back to New York to see as many of the new spring Broadway openings as possible, including Purpose, which had recently opened at the Hayes Theatre. The Hayes, one of my favourite playhouses. This little intimate space that harnesses an extraordinary energy. I've seen some really fantastic plays there, including last season another Brandon Jacobs Jenkins written piece titled Appropriate, which went on to win the Tony Award for best revival of a play. In that utterly shocking shouting match for play, the playwright focused on a dysfunctional white family in the American South. And in Purpose we find ourselves in Chicago where we meet the equally dysfunctional but critically the very prestigious members of a black family, the Jaspers. And in today's full review, I'm going to let you know a little bit more about what happens in this play, about how it speaks to previous work that we've seen on stage, about the staggering performances which it contains. But as always, I would also love to know what you thought. If you have already seen Purpose at the Hayes Theatre or previously at Steppenwolf in Chicago, let us all know what you thought of it in the comments down below. And as always, if you enjoy listening to what I have to say, make sure you're following me on podcast platforms or subscribed right here on YouTube with notifications turned on somewhere below my face so that YouTube lets you know every time I share a new review. My thoughts on many other plays and musicals from Broadway and the West End coming very soon, as well as my coverage of all things Tony Awards, where I am anticipating we will hear a lot of love for Purpose. But let's talk about why that is. Let's discuss the brilliance of Purpose. So it feels pertinent to mention that this was commissioned by Steppenwolf in the wake of great success for Brendan Jacobs Jenkins for works like Appropriate as well as an Octoroon. Steppenwolf are a hugely respected theatre company based out of Chicago with a focus on their brilliant ensemble of actors, and my understanding of what sort of typifies a Steppenwolf show very much seems to align with Brenton Jacobs Jenkins thoughts, because this type of a play feels strikingly familiar of some of their most famous work, notably perhaps Tracy Lett's August Osage county, which went on to transfer to Broadway and was then subsequently adapted for film with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, for crying out loud. In that play, the semi estranged members of a family are brought back together by circumstance. They return to the family home, they have a very contentious dinner which erupts into a physical altercation. All the while, the members of the younger generation have to reckon with the sins of the older. All very familiar of purpose. But it isn't just August Osage county that this play feels like it's speaking to. It also feels like it's in response to the classic American family drama the likes of Cat and A Hot Tin Roof quite specifically. And the presence of of a great and respected man as the figurehead of this family as pictured here on the show artwork also reminds me of those sort of great man plays, like Death of a Salesman is the obvious one, but also All My Sons. You know, Arthur Miller and his daddy issues. Also Long Day's Journey into Night. Just like there, we have two different sons here, neither of whom have been able to satisfy their father's expectations, both reckoning with the same kind of ideas of like, how dare you follow in my footsteps? And how dare you not follow closely enough in my footsteps? The father in question is Solomon Jasper, played by Harry Lennox. He is a significant religious figure and political figure within the black community. He was very central to the civil rights movement alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, whose picture is displayed on the set along with Solomon Jasper's own. And if it isn't enough that this is conveyed to us via narration from our protagonist character named Nas, who I'll introduce to you in just a moment. When a friend of his enters into his family home and is taken aback by the realization that this is House of the Jaspers, we get a sense of just how much this means in this world now in terms of where we are, because we're talking about figures from the civil rights movement and their impact felt decades down the line. This is canonically a post pandemic play, this friendship between Naz and the other character, whose name is Aziza, having developed over lockdown when the two of them spent more time together. It's a platonic relationship, though we will find out more about why later on alongside plenty of other revelations. As with so many plays that we've seen before, this is a play that offers plenty by way of dramatic revelation, revelations, and of course that staple of the great dysfunctional American family drama Dinner Table Chaos. Now, our protagonist, whose name is Naz, short for Nazareth, is the younger of the two sons of Solomon Jasper and his wife Claudine. But it's a little while before we find this out, or exactly what it is that we are looking at, because he is introduced to us upon this static set, which is a gorgeous set design that I'll tell you a little bit more about later on. But at the beginning, his narration, which is pretty straightforward, pretty standard storytelling, concerns the long winded circumstances by which he returned to his family home in Chicago and that he was driven there by a friend for whom he had agreed to be a sperm donor, the two of them having met up in Niagara Falls in order to facilitate that process. Now, the reason for his prodigal son esque return to his family home is in conjunction with a similar homecoming for his brother who has recently got out of prison for white collar crime. His brother, who is named after their father, Solomon Jasper Jr. They plan to celebrate his release and his freedom with a belated birthday party for or their mother. All of this to avoid mentioning some of the more ugly realities of their recent years. Also little mention from them for the fact that Solomon Junior's wife Morgan, who is not best too pleased about this whole situation, is set to go to prison because the two of them have both been convicted and will serve consecutive sentences because they are parents. I thought immediately, ah, not unlike the Jew dices from the Real Housewives of New Jersey, because I'm cultured like that now I say white collar crime. I believe that was correct. It's financial embezzlement in any case, but it's embezzlement of campaign funds because he's a state senator, having attempted to make his father proud and follow in the footsteps of this great man and ensure his legacy. Nazareth, meanwhile, has taken a very different approach and he is still feeling the parental disappointment of what he refers to, I think, as the great betrayal, or the great disappointment wherein he had dropped out of divinity school and subsequently became a nature photographer. And so with him as our narrator, he feels like a slightly more down to earth personality to introduce us to this auspicious world. And so does Aziza. She arrives in wonderment and in awe over all of this and of this family and of suddenly realizing who her friend is. She refers to him at one point as basically a black Nepo baby. And having completed the transactional meeting of trying to get pregnant with his donated sperm, she reels at the realization that she might be pregnant with black history which is another fantastic line. This character, Aziza, is played by the scene, stealingly hilarious Kara Young, who has been wowing audiences consecutive Broadway seasons, who has not too long ago become a Tony Award winner for her barnstorming performance in Pelle Victorious. When she processes in real time that she may be carrying his child and reacts with extraordinary shock, it's as though she has secured her next Tony nomination within minutes of entering the stage with this brilliant energy. Except for the fact that she is not alone in this remarkable company. But we'll talk more about the rest of the performances later. First, I want to talk a little bit more about this framing device with the narration, because I think it's valuable at the beginning. Not only is there a lot of exposition that needs to happen here, we need to understand a lot of the family history and the politics at play, because they're not going to talk about them over the dinner table. And Nazareth, as a character who is not especially emotionally forthcoming, is also not going to be inclined realistically to share his insights on the situation with anyone else, even with his friend Aziza, certainly not with his family. There is some discussion later on about the possibility of him being on the autistic spectrum. And so the use of narration as a tool, in any case, engineers a little emotional proximity between us and him. And it works really well within those first few scenes, because the way that each of these characters are introduced and characterized in the use of adjectives here proves very pointed. There is a literal Chekhov's gun moment that we understand to be a Chekhov's gun moment, because as soon as he makes reference to this enormous shotgun, he says something along the lines of, I had no idea. I couldn't have known at that moment how fateful it would go on to be. So it's letting us know that it's Chekhov's gun. And we don't need to feel smart in the auditorium by deciding that for ourselves. But the same principle of this seemingly innocuous thing that will come to have tremendous significance is also present in the introduction of each of these characters. When he tells us about his mother, for example, and the fact that she has a law degree that she never uses anymore since her marriage, since becoming the wife of Solomon Jasper and becoming alongside him the figurehead of this household, a homemaker. And having all of these additional domestic responsibilities, as well as all of the business side of things. It seems like it's just a way of us understanding where she is in a little bit of context of her as a human being. But it turns out to be very fateful. By the end of the play, you see her retaining the use of that kind of legal skill, the way that she brokers relationships and decisions within the family. The situation over dinner unfolds such that she feels as though she needs to require Aziza, who is an outsider to the family, to sign a non disclosure agreement. We come to find out that there is some recent and less recent history of her using her legal expertise in order to resolve other external family issues. Claudine is realized powerfully on stage by Latanya Richardson Jackson, who at the performance I saw received entrance applause that was commenced by her husband, Samuel L. Jackson. That's not whatsoever relevant to her performance or to the production, but I thought it was a fun little footnote. She arrives as a woman of clear authority whose inclination to control is for the moment taking a back seat to her excitement to see her son and to see a young woman alongside her son who may potentially be a love interest. And despite his protestations to the contrary, with the snow beginning to fall outside and the roads becoming less safe to drive on, she insists that her son's friend Azizah stay for dinner and stay overnight rather than try and drive multiple states back to New York, which admittedly is a very long way to travel even when it isn't snow. What's particularly fun here is the antithetical contrast between the way in which she embraces Aziza and really gives her very little choice and drags her into the family home and savors the pronunciation of her name, Aziza, and the palpable disdain that she has for her daughter in law, Morgan, to whom she attributes the blame for her grandchildren not being present at her birthday celebrations. She announces hysterically to the room, it was decided that my grandchildren didn't need to spend any time with me. A very pointed sentence that she later reprises again as though everyone didn't hear it the first time, and this characterization of her eager to spend time with her grandchildren and shading her daughter in law and being excited about trying to set up a relationship with her son and this viable young woman I think is all meant to feel deliberately familiar. It feels as though we're establishing fodder for very traditional sort of sitcom family dynamics. But in fact the stakes here are significantly higher, much of which has to do with her husband, Solomon Jasper, who she tells us is is enjoying fewer public speaking bookings than in recent years and who is about to turn 80 and who we come to learn has recently taken up beekeeping. This Seems pretty bizarre from the outset, but we soon enough come to learn what this means to him, which is this sense of having a purpose. Ding, ding. We've said the title. And it's more than just the tragedy of this once great man reduced to beekeeping in his own home in order to feel like he's relevant, in order to feel like he's needed by something smaller than him. It's also, I think, the very specific reality reaction of a man who was very involved in the civil rights movement and who had to learn to be a leader and who doesn't know how to release that impulse. And while he arrives as a stoic figure of few words, whose disappointment in his sons and honestly, just about everyone else in the household is very evident, he eventually has plenty to say about the current political system and about the way that his history is remembered. He says, after all, that history isn't a thing that you're in, it's what they call it after the fact. With one possible explanation for his particularly frosty behavior at dinner being, as he says, watching these fools in Washington try to undo everything that we worked hard for. There is a particularly strong sense of agreement in the audience when he says these words, which manifested at my performance as a very loud mmm. And as some friction begins to arise between the younger and older generations, hear a lot of it around personal circumstances that we'll go on to chat a little bit more about. It turns out the first sort of political sticking point here is going to be climate change, something that Solomon Jasper is a little indifferent to the idea of. And though that seems a little ludicrous, his explanation for his feelings on the topic are fairly neatly explained when he says, it's hard for me to get too worked up about the animals when I'm still fighting, trying not to be treated like one. Let's continue to unpack the rest of this play, then, moving towards the dinner table scene that happens towards the end of Act 1, with a few spoilers to follow. So, after some extensive exposition with Morgan Nazarus's sister in law being the last character for us to really get to understand, because she has yet to particularly say anything, arriving reluctantly at the dinner table in sunglasses and performing a monologue of resentful body language, we enter into an explosive scene around the dinner table, which we've been forewarned, much like with the whole Chekhov's gun thing, is going to be explosive. Naz tells us in advance that family dinners for them can be thought of as the Olympics of doing the most we find out a little bit more about Naz and Aziza and their identities. Aziza is not a heterosexual woman and Naz identifies as asexual, something that his parents have an extraordinary amount of trouble understanding. They feel as though he has chosen a path of isolation and solitude. And eventually conversation stumbles onto what the two of them were doing together in Niagara Falls, which he had no intention of bringing up. As Aziza frantically tries to catch Nazareth's evasive gaze and ends up clumsily walking into a complete confession of what's happen in an attempt to try and defend his sexual identity. The response is among my favorite lines I've ever heard spoken in a theater, when his mother asks Aziza, what would inspire a lesbian like you to drive six and a half hours to spend time with an asexual man in the honeymoon capital of the world? Thankfully for Naz and Aziza, however, they aren't the only targets at the dinner table. There is also a lot of focus on Junior and his wife, Morgan Jr. Having announced that he has this big plan for the next phase of his life that he wishes to publish into a book the inspiring letters, letters which his mother wrote to him while he was in prison. And after we hear from a couple of those hilariously casual letters that describe going to Whole Foods and going to see the Barbie movie in significant brevity, he launches into a tirade about the shortcomings of the prison industrial complex and about people serving life sentences for things that are no longer even crimes, eventually reaching an emotional climax where he declares, it's more than just imprisonment, it's displacement within your own life. Fascinatingly, with little regard for the family fact that this is the system his wife is about to enter into. Very much centering himself in this, we come to understand him as a slightly self centered and ultimately foolish character. When Naz introduced the character of his brother earlier, he described him as the king of the pivot, something he reminds us of in this moment. His father, the great Solomon Jasper, however, is not about to let this idea become a reality. He dismisses his son immediately and is staggered by this suggestion. He says, haven't you done enough to embarrass us and damage our reputation? He says to him, you really think you discovered something about one of the oldest tools for inequality in the world talking about the prison system. And this is where it begins to feel acutely hot tin roof with this angered father figure who quite possibly is thinking about his own mortality at his age, utterly enraged by the behavior of one of his sons who has done everything he asked to try and win his approval and trying to get through to the other, who he innately respects far more, but wants nothing, nothing to do with him. It gets even more Cat on a Hot Tin Roof when he shockingly lashes out at his wife in the midst of all of this and suggests to her that she should leave the dinner table. This is where our jaws really start to drop, and no one will give that to you in a contemporary play like Brandon Jacobs Jenkins. No one is making me gasp aloud in a theater or evoking these noises, these loud noises of shock in an audience like this playwright is. But unlike the world of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, which this feels like it's paying homage to, it is also outrageously funny. At every other turn, we keep moving like a tennis match between dramatic and hysterical. And so it feels like a contemporary interpretation of the classic American family drama play that is married to the world of soap opera and sitcom in a fusion that proves so satisfying, so dramatic and so provoking of conversation for the audience. Audience. And just before we arrive at intermission, shock and hilarity are delivered with both hands by the character of Morgan, played by Alana Arenas. Up until now, she's been almost entirely silent, while Kari Young and Latanya Richardson Jackson have basically been dusting their mantelpieces and comparing notes on how they're going to display their Tony Awards. This is a huge game changer for the play because she suddenly explodes with all of this honesty, with this indictment of the Jasper family and the way that they behave, with all of this criticism them, with the outrage and the resentment of a woman who is about to go and serve a jail sentence, one that isn't being talked about at an event that instead is celebrating the birthday of a woman whose birthday it is not. As she points out, this particular outburst has been preempted by little individual line deliveries that have, up to this point, had 100% hit rate on a huge audience response. She has been a character of few words, but every single thing that she has said has had a massive reaction. And just before intermission, she goes all the way off, talking about alleged illegitimate children, talking about her financial situation at the hands of the family lawyers, talking about having been screwed over as a member of this family, talking about all of the issues that she has been facing that are being neglected or ignored in favor of celebrating their felon son. She says to the two Jasper parents, you'll manage to raise a whole entire felon. She has a lot more at stake here. Because she has also been disbarred, she has no professional future after the behavior of her husband for which she is answering. Heading into the second act, there is more exploration of this as she tries to find an ally in Nazareth, someone who can understand his parents hypocrisy. Aziza and Naz, meanwhile, arrive at an unexpected argument about her plans for parenthood. We are further reassured that Naz's brother Junior is simply a self centered fool. And as Clawdeen tries to calmly wrangle and manage an unruly situation, Naz and his father eventually sit down down for an emotionally honest conversation about his asexuality, the reconciliation of his dismissal of which alongside his own admissions of infidelity is extraordinary. And that is what you have to enjoy from the second act of Purpose to finish this review, let's talk a little about the company and the creatives that have brought this production to the Hayes Theatre. So the first thing that we see is this gorgeous set design, this luxurious classic family home with all of these warm hues that feels like a slightly more political interpretation of like a classic sitcom family home. The set has been designed by Todd Rosenthal who surprise surprise, also created the scenic design for August Osage county with Faye Armand Troncoso credited with set decoration and props. And this is also my absolute favorite kind of set, one that is completely naturalistic, that is an entire world. It's a house with multiple levels. They're entering via doors and not via wings. You can see light outside beyond the windows. We can see snow falling and collecting on the window panes as they about this blizzard increasing. It has the feel of something so genuine and so real, which is in step with the direction here from Felicia Rashad, which we'll talk about, which is in step with the performances and the writing. It's very Steppenwolf. It is all naturalistic. It is all deeply crafted, layered portraits of real human beings navigating real if extraordinary family problems in a way that is utterly believable and compellingly theatrical. And don't get me wrong, I am also a defender of the abstract set design, but love to peer into a fascinating world like it's a goldfish bowl. And that's what you can do here. Let's talk about that direction from Felicia Richard. I spoke about the balance of shocking drama and side splitting comedy in Brandon Jacobs Jenkins work. Sometimes they follow each other like train carriages that are interlinked. Sometimes they are together in the same sentence and something is as staggering as it is hilarious. Felicia Richard feels like A really great person to realize that balance because she has great history working with both of those elements. She has had a prolific sitcom career. The elephant in the room being that that was on the Cosby show, headed by this once respected great man who now has a tarnished legacy, which also seems to speak to the play here. She and Brandon Jacobs Jenkins are also greatly matched collaborators when it comes to being custodians of this story that has important intergenerational conversations. There is a particularly crystallizing moment in the second act when there is conversation finding kinship between the historic Civil Rights movement and the Black Lives Matter conversation that gained ground during Lockdown. Though it's around this time, the show's second act, that I'm looking to discern a little more specificity in terms of its meaning and that thing that it's trying to articulate. Because we're having a great many simultaneous conversations and we're talking about the sins of the father, and we're talking about how to measure up to impossible expectations, and we're talking about these intergenerational divides, and we're talking about faith, and we're talking about sexuality, and we're talking about asexuality and we're talking about class. When Morgan admits that she feels as though she was fetishized for her working class class background, when she was sort of politically selected to be Junior's wife for the visibility that she would afford him, for what she could do to his image, we're talking about the expectations that go along with the concept of black excellence. We find ourselves having an unexpected designer babies debate. We're talking about how people regard the autistic spectrum and how it's thought of. But perhaps just like in a real life family argument, as we head into this second act, it all becomes so emotional, emotionally wrought and overblown, and there's so much at stake and there's so much that's been said that can't be taken back. It's hard for us to really narrow our focus to any kind of a point. And perhaps there's an attempt made for the whole thing to be about legacy, which is invoked a little in this final narration monologue from Nazareth. Latanya Richardson Jackson, prior to this, has had a really extraordinary speech about motherhood that I think is some of her best work in a really fantastic role. For me, though, the most fascinating conversation comes shortly before the end, when Naz finally has a good faith conversation and emotional exchange with his father, where his father finally feels a little more open to really Hearing about Naz's perspective on his own asexual identity. And because this is Brandon Jacobs Jenkins and he's always going to go there, the conversation turns to what happened in Niagara Falls and how Nazareth, as a self identifying asexual, managed to conjure the sperm that he donated to his friend Aziza. The answer to which is hilarious and somehow also profound. At the same time, his father smiles for what feels like the first time in response to this. And we are so close to attacking from multiple sides the question of what gives someone purpose? What gives a young person in today's society purpose? How can someone who was so involved in such an important chapter of life changing history find purpose in their later years? Who is responsible for that purpose? To what do we owe our parents in terms of that conversation as well? We are so close to that being really sharply brought into focus. There's just a couple too many other conversations, perhaps in the way, and a lot of the narration that takes place in the second act slows our pace a little. There are some asides where Naz explains details that we already understand. There are things that he doesn't need to clarify for us that happen anyway. There's this question that I felt moved to ask about why way men are moved to name their sons after themselves and what the weight of expectation is that goes along with that. And whether Junior would have been a different type of man if he was called something else. Nazareth being named obviously for something that invokes ideas of home and of salvation, when this is something that he's very resistant to, trying to find home for himself away from his family, trying to find it in nature and trying to find his own peace. By the end, I felt as though we'd really got somewhere with the metaphorical value of Solomon's inclination towards the bees and towards beekeeping. And not only for him finding that sense of purpose once again, but also this metaphor of all of them as workers in the hive, contributing to something. Regardless, though, whether or not the whole thing is sharpened to a neat point, it is such delicious dialogue and such rich character that any time spent in the company of Brandon Jacobs Jenkins writing is always remarkably satisfying. He is writing, like I said, this kind of prestige, high art sofa soap opera in response to the great American play eliciting a symphony of stunned gasps from a rapturous audience. This is a fantastic play. Go and see it on Broadway if you're any kind of a fan of any of those great plays that we mentioned. And of course, if you've seen it already, Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section down below. Thank you so much for listening to my review. I hope that you enjoyed if you did, make sure you're subscribed right here on YouTube. Turn on those notifications notifications so you don't miss any upcoming Broadway or West End reviews. Or go follow me on podcast platforms. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.