‘Purpose’ arrives at Geffen Playhouse with its Tony-winning Broadway cast intact

The family drama is a distinct American genre— one at which playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins excels. His 2013 show, “Appropriate,” about a prominent Arkansas clan that discovers old photos tying their deceased paterfamilias to a Jim Crow era lynch mob, won a Tony Award for best revival two years ago. Jacobs-Jenkins soon topped that by winning the 2025 Pulitzer Prize along with a Tony for best drama for his next play, “Purpose,” which unfolds during a snow day in the Chicago home of a prominent civil rights leader named Solomon Jasper.

That production is making its Los Angeles premiere at Geffen Playhouse, beginning Wednesday and running through Dec. 20. The Broadway and Steppenwolf Theatre Company production features the same Tony-nominated and Tony-winning team as it had in New York, including director Phylicia Rashad and actor Kara Young, who won a Tony for best featured actress for her portrayal of Aziza, a social worker who ends up in the middle of the family conflict at the heart of the play.

“I feel like we’re always using family as a metaphor. It’s always a stand-in for some American crisis,” Jacobs-Jenkins said in a recent Zoom interview from New York. “This is something I discovered when I was working on ‘Appropriate,’ every major family drama you can think of is animated in some way by anxieties of race and class. Ultimately, this is your tribe and you gotta figure out where your tribe’s value lives and what challenges that tribe’s value.”

The “Purpose” tribe was inspired by an array of prominent political families, but the one most commonly referenced by audiences is that of civil rights icon Jesse Jackson. Like Jackson, Solomon (Harry Lennix), is a former clergyman and old-school activist, while his son, Solomon Jr. (Glenn Davis), is a disgraced politician fresh from serving prison time for mishandling campaign funds. Junior’s estranged wife, the bitter and often hilariously caustic Morgan (Alana Arenas), wants nothing to do with any of them, while her mother-in-law Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), pilots the family through trying times. Observing with a jaundiced eye is Naz (Jon Michael Hill), a nature photographer and narrator of the chaotic weekend as it unfolds. Along for the ride is his friend Aziza, expectant mother of his child conceived through artificial insemination.

For Jacobs-Jenkins, inspiration came from the work of Arthur Miller, which prompted him to ask why there were no family dramas in the American canon centering Black people of status. It inspired a deep dive into political histories, which led to the realization that no Black political dynasty has endured beyond two or three generations.

Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre commissioned the play after the success of “Appropriate,” stipulating that Jacobs-Jenkins use two actors from its ensemble. This led to the casting of Hill, Davis and Arenas. Jacobs-Jenkins noted that he was also required to write the play in the company’s house style: muscular realism.

“As we worked together over the ensuing years and various workshop settings, the story and the family began to emerge,” he said. “When I was in rehearsals for the revival of ‘Appropriate’ on Broadway, a lot of the writing was happening then.”

The central action of the play takes place during a dinner foreshadowed by Naz telling the audience to “Buckle up!” It’s a lengthy scene that introduces long-standing points of friction between characters — Junior’s plan to revive his career by publishing his mother’s letters, the platonic parental arrangement between Naz and Aziza, Solomon’s discontent with Junior, and Morgan’s discontent with all of them.

LaTanya Richardson Jackson, left, Kara Young, Glenn Davis and Jon Michael Hill in the Broadway / Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of “Purpose,” which makes its L.A. premiere at Geffen Playhouse.

(Marc J. Franklin)

“A really important site of a family cohering is that dinner table. So I always find it’s incredibly satisfying on stage,” said Jacobs-Jenkins, acknowledging a nod to the dinner scene in another well-known family drama, “August: Osage County.”

“Everyone’s days are stacked, and that’s where the story gets wrestled out of how the family is moving forward,” he said.

Rashad’s turn as pill-popping family matriarch, Violet Weston, in “August: Osage County” suitably prepared her for directing the dinner drama in “Purpose.”

“There’s certain things that will happen within the scene, whether an actor turns to the left or the right, who you’re speaking to, whether someone is seated in a way that lifts them up higher,” Rashad said of the physically static yet dramatically compelling sequence. “I study the play very carefully, but I’m always hearing something new, no matter how many times I’ve read it. I’m looking to see what comes naturally to the actors. And that kind of informs the direction that I’ll give.”

Phylicia Rashad is directing Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Tony Award-winning play, “Purpose” at the Geffen Playhouse.

(Evan Mulling / For The Times)

When Jacobs-Jenkins finished writing “Purpose,” he felt he had composed, “a high tragedian drama.” But once it hit the boards, the theater filled with laughter.

“I don’t think of myself as a comic writer in that I don’t think in terms of joke structures and comic structures,” he said, shaking his head, noting the many situations that elicit laughter. “I really just try to make illusions of people that feel real. I try to make room for all those kinds of audience responses in the work just because it’s ultimately about connecting to the viewer.”

Much of the humor isn’t on the page but in the performances, like when Aziza chides Naz for concealing the historic relevance of his family and then, realizing their prominence, cries, “Oh, my God!” With hands on her stomach — and her future baby who will carry the same genes — she widens her eyes and repeats the line.

“You don’t always have to tell actors exactly what to do, especially when you’re working with people who are creative and inquisitive, and who like to take risks and try things. Some gestures seem very natural for an actor. But if you change actors, you might get something different,” said Rashad, who has won two Tonys for her acting and made her Broadway directorial debut with “Purpose.”

Best known for playing Clair Huxtable on the 1980s sitcom “The Cosby Show,” Rashad has received six Emmy nominations and is currently in HBO’s “The Gilded Age.” She won an NAACP Theatre Award for directing Center Theatre Group’s 2014 production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at the Mark Taper Forum, and she’ll be returning to CTG next spring to direct August Wilson’s critically acclaimed “Fences”.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins poses in the press room with the award for best revival of a play for “Appropriate” during the 2024 Tony Awards.

(Evan Agostini / invision/ AP)

Riding high on accolades for “Purpose,” Jacobs-Jenkins recently announced his next play, “Grass,” starring Daniel Kaluuya in his New York stage debut at the Park Avenue Armory in February. A news release describes it as “equal parts fantasia, memory play, and morality play…a surreal meditation on the limits of personal, ancestral, and national identity amidst social upheaval.”

Despite being at the height of his career, Jacobs-Jenkins expressed some trepidation about staging a show in the cavernous, 55,000-square-foot Armory. “A mother and son take a road trip through the South and kooky stuff happens. So, it’s a road play,” he paused, a nervous grin spreading across his face. “We’ll see if I pull it off.”

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