Prominent among the buzz generators this Broadway season is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Purpose,” playing at the Hayes Theater through this August. “Purpose,” the winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play, examines themes that converge, over a 24-hour period, on two generations of the Jaspers, a Chicago-based family that is explicitly inspired by the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s family life.
The plot in “Purpose” is disarmingly spirited along by smart, sitcom-adjacent humor, but is ultimately grounded in a moral and political complexity that lets you know that whoever wrote this ain’t playing around.
There’s so much back story. “Purpose” employs a narrative Sherpa in the form of Nazareth “Naz” Jasper, the perpetually fourth-wall-breaking younger son of Civil Rights Movement living legend Solomon Jasperand family caretaker Claudine Jasper. Naz, fresh off a spiritually elevating photography assignment, lands at his family home only to be joined by Aziza Houston, the queer woman with whom Naz has previously arranged to asexually conceive a child. Aziza soon finds herself waist deep in high-voltage family dynamics that also include Naz’s elder, emotionally struggling brother Junior, who has recently finished a prison sentence for financial fraud, and Junior’s embittered, Jasper-loathing wife Morgan, who has been court-ordered to swap places in prison with Junior because of her complicity with his crimes.
We’re given early warning by Naz that the family dinner will become the battleground for some lively family messiness, and to say that hijinks and drama ensue is an understatement. The second act is spent sifting through the dinner’s emotional wreckage of recriminations, revelations, and threats.
This kind of family complexity, — one that carries a broader sociological resonance — is my jam, so I sat down with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins via Zoom to dig deeper into his portrayal of the Jaspers and Black American generational identity.
AmNews: So much of Junior’s sense of being lost, both personally and professionally, is a result of his swimming in the backwash of the Civil Rights Movement and his father’s legacy. Daddy Jasper claims that everyone “knew their role” in the Civil Rights Movement, but this is clearly not the case for Junior a generation later. Junior complains that he was never taught anything by his father or properly mentored, and he clearly doesn’t know what his social role and purpose are.
What’s your take on the political grounding of this nation’s newest generation of political leadership? Are they clear? Are they confused? How much faith do you have in their sense of purpose and political vision?
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (BJ-J): As far as intentional commentary, I don’t know if I can claim that. I’m writing from a place of observation. My mother moved to DC to be a part of [President] Jimmy Carter’s cabinet and she sent me to an Afrocentric school where my teachers were all activists, Pan-Africanists, and former Panthers, so I grew up in this stew of facets of what we might think of as Black political life and activism from the 20th century.
This play came to me in some form at the very back end of Obama II. I’m haunted by an image from Obama’s [acceptance speech] from his first win: There’s a shot from the [news] coverage, of Jesse Jackson standing in the crowd with a single tear rolling down his face, and I’m just thinking like, man, there are so many things pinging off of each other in this moment, symbolically, in terms of history. I think what’s never quite unpacked fully is the depth and richness and wide-ranging strategies that make up the gains of Black political life in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I’m gesturing at the romanticization of the Civil Rights Movement and, let’s say, the commodification of it, or the kind of distilling it into its symbols. This commodification created these slipstreams, like you said, the weight of which Junior is swimming in. In some ways, he’s trying to live his life on patterns that are old, and the trap he falls into is not being able to stay present to what’s really happening.
I remember the early moments of Black Lives Matter (BLM). I lived two blocks from the Barclays Center during the uprisings, and the constant refrain I was hearing from my mother and her generation — who were the last gasp of boomers, the last gasp of the Jim Crow generation — was, “Who is the leader? Where is the leader?” She had come up in a space where, to make progress, there had to be one voice leading the many, so she couldn’t even wrap her head around what was happening with BLM. Everyone is responding to the same experience of disenfranchisement, injustice, inequality, and needless Black death, and yet, we only ever are taught about the one version of it that’s sort of mainstream, right? Every town has a Martin Luther King Boulevard in it.
At the same time, I’m witnessing a lot of friends who discovered activism in the last 10 years, and were suddenly trying to piece together a legacy for themselves, because they were responding to the reality of what was happening outside their front doors, but I was also witnessing them go through what all those lovely folks in the ’60s and ’70s were going through, which was a kind of fatigue. This is a kind of work and a practice that is draining. It costs people things and sometimes that cost is borne out on the level of familial relationships and even personal relationships. How do you live as a full person, and yet also commit oneself to a necessary cause? That’s the tension in the Jasper family. While Solomon Jasper was out literally making the world freer for some folks, his family was in a certain kind of trap.
AmNews: You talked about demystifying the civil rights era and, of course, you use the word “purpose” very intentionally in the title. Do you feel like that sense of purpose exists in the political moment we’re in today? Or is it even fair to make the comparison?
BJ-J: I do think that the purpose exists. I think the challenge is for us to become aware of it, to figure out how to articulate it and lock into it.
You know, there’s so much that discourages individuals from being brave enough to step out and say what they feel to take action, because we live in an anti-DEI culture, which is a wild concept. Who’s anti-diversity on a planet that is nothing but diverse, right? Or anti-woke? The opposite of woke is asleep.
People are so self-conscious. This is what happened to a lot of Panthers. In pop cultural spaces, they were always depicted as buffoons, disorganized, and it robbed that moment of its real richness and intellectual rigor. I think everyone feels the purpose, but can’t find their way into it.
What’s preventing us from locking into that space? That’s the conversation, I think, worth having. The title, “Purpose,” is inspired by a book I came across by a very important political scholar and historian. He talked about the ’80s in terms of the narrative of Black political life being an era of a crisis of purpose, where in some ways it had achieved the gains of political buy-in that it had been after, and once that happened, there was no plan. There was a vacuum of all this energy, where it was like, “Well, now what — now what do we do?” That moment is what kind of stalled things out, maybe. That’s kind of the argument being made [in “Purpose”].
AmNews: Do you feel like we’ve moved beyond that moment? Because I actually lived it.
BJ-J: The world’s new every day, and new people are constantly showing up, right? I think I’ve always been interested in these cycles that seem to happen socially, where another generation comes of age and goes, “Wait a minute. Why am I being treated like this?” And they have to reconnect to some old version of the struggle. But I’m always interested in those moments in between. Like, what happened? What’s that collective act of forgetting or over-exhaustion when things get quiet; these benign neglect moments? Of course, it’s different, it’s not the ’80s anymore. I was born in the ’80s. It’s 40 years later, and the world is a new place.
The same old things are happening, but there are new forms of it. The beginning of my career was very contentious for people. I have a play called “Appropriate” that premiered 10 years ago. It did well, but it was met with a lot of aggression in a way that was crazy. Ten years later, it’s on Broadway, it wins a Tony. I realized in that 10-year period, people just had more language for this experience. That creation of language, that creation of ideas, that documentation of points of view — that does move the conversation forward. I believe people just have more tools to process their experience of struggle.
AmNews: What about the concept of “Black Excellence” that the Jasper family both epitomizes and feels deeply burdened by? What was your view of the notion of Black Excellence growing up, which is to say — where do you fall in the spectrum? Do you believe that being an accomplished Black professional, who is a credit to their race, is a necessary North Star for Black folks, people whom the world is trying to convince are wretched? Or do you think Black Excellence is a dangerous bourgeois construct that we need to dismantle because it oversimplifies our humanity? I know those are two extremes, but where do you fall between them?
BJ-J: I guess I want to have both. You do need models in the world, because I think young people and young minds are often shaped by what forms of thought they have access to.
I think about Toni Morrison every day because I don’t think I would have understood there was a path somewhere for me to be a writer without the model of Toni Morrison. I’m reading “Toni at Random,” which is a book about her years as an editor and how she was so daring and so experimental and took no guff from anybody. That groundbreaking, that path-breaking … I would say I’m one of thousands of Black writers who benefited from that excellence.
But that idea of a Black writer and the mold that she cast of difficult work that was deserving of the work to get through it; the intelligence, that ownership of the active reading of literature and the canon — those things were essential for me to be able to get to where I am. I just needed to have that.
At the same time, there’s nothing worse than when these things create divisions within the community or are weaponized and you’re ultimately re-inscribing a kind of class system. I do think that part of the challenge for the Jasper family is they’re kind of hoisted on their petards — their own ambitions that they bought into. They drank the Kool-Aid with a promise because they didn’t know what they didn’t know. It’s all coming back now, to be reckoned.
How do you forgive yourself? How do you forgive the choices you make as a young person? How do you stay committed to a struggle that you don’t know the end of and how it’s going to look?
Then, how do you live with what the results are, that reality of life, which is that everything comes with wins and losses. I think I live in that space where we shouldn’t be afraid of excellence, shouldn’t demonize excellence. But also excellence is fleeting — excellent by whose standards? Life, if you’re lucky, is long, and you live through many different yardsticks that emerge that want to tell you what you’re worth or what you’re not worth.
Solomon feels that he dedicated his life to achieving freedom for his people, and when he can’t quite see that his kids are living free, as free as they can, it doesn’t look like what he thought freedom would be. How do you live with the fact that you still did the work? You just couldn’t control what the work looked like.
AmNews: You clearly wanted to make people think when they were experiencing “Purpose,” but you clearly wanted to entertain them as well. I saw the show twice, and the two audiences laughed in different ways to different things. I don’t know if you’ve experienced that.
BJ-J: I haven’t seen it in a while, but I have heard the audiences have gotten quite raucous, and I heard last night was a very good audience.
AmNews: Yeah, it was a great audience.
How intentional, how strategic was your use of humor? Were there things that you felt would be better communicated or received differently through humor?
BJ-J: Try as I might, I cannot write a sad thing that’s just sad the whole time. I’ve tried, and people still laugh. Something about my voice clearly is comic, and I need to let that be the thing.
Laughter is a very important and useful tool in the theater. No one knows why we laugh, but it does a lot of things. One, it’s proof that you’re listening. If you’re laughing, it’s because you got something, and you’re receptive to that thing. Laughter also is a thing you can’t be very self-conscious about — it’s a thing you kind of do automatically. And when we do it in a group, and we realize we’re all laughing, and subconsciously, you feel connected to people. You’re realizing that you share a point of view with other people in this space, and that should be a thing that unifies and grounds you.
There are very important experiences where you hear some people laughing and other people not laughing, and you ask yourself, why am I not laughing?
AmNews: I want to come back to this question of generational split. With Daddy and Mama Jasper, there was so much surety, conviction, and fixedness in their political ideology, purpose, gender identity, mental identity, cultural norms, etc. But in the next generation, with Aziza, Naz, and Junior, there’s so much exploration, there’s fluidity, there’s unsteadiness. What do you think accounts for that generational contrast?
BJ-J: I think it’s something about shame. I find that shame is such an interesting curse for a lot of families.
For that generation that [Solomon] and other elders belong to (I would count my own parents in that world), they have a very difficult time talking about experiences of pain, experiences of embarrassment. Part of their survival was about not acknowledging the wounds that shaped their lives, but when you don’t acknowledge those wounds, you become those wounds, and suddenly you’re being parented by a wound. As a child, you’re being shaped by something you can’t ever name. It’s like a ghost in the room, and that creates its own forms of anxiety.
For me, it’s about trying to create a new generation — people who are ready to release the chokehold of that because that’s where freedom is going to start, when we can acknowledge the good and the bad, and take pride in being a part of our historic and familial makeup.
I think about Mom and Dad [Jasper] at the same age their kids are, and how at that point, they were already young parents. They were in the world experimenting in ways that their own parents could never have dreamed of for them. They were going to college, they were seeing the world, they were leaving the 20-mile radius of the little farm that their families had come from. Everything was an experiment for them, too, but the experiment looked different. What they don’t see is that their children are doing the same thing.
It’s the same kind of path of self-definition that everyone goes down, but when you do it in a different world, you can sometimes lose the forest for the trees.
I think Aziza, Junior, and Nazareth are very free people. Nazareth gets to live his life in the woods, taking pictures of lakes, and he gets paid for that. There’s nothing freer than that, you know? Aziza’s a single woman, she doesn’t have a child, she’s well-employed. She’s proud of where she is. Even Junior, who is fresh out of prison and his wife’s going in, literally is free.
He’s also free from the chokehold of this dynastic life he was supposed to live. He’s trying to learn how to live without his father’s name. To appreciate those things, you have to look past the trappings of what might make them “undesirable” children to a certain generation of people. For me, it’s about releasing shame to find purpose.
AmNews: You explore sexual identity, as well as mental health, in “Purpose,” and Aziza at one point even suggests that Naz’s asexuality is somehow connected to his neurodivergence. Was that mashup of sexual identity and neurology an incidental one-off, or was it intentional and part of some kind of larger point?
BJ-J: For me, it’s about this idea of self-determination. The great irony and existential struggle of Black American life is trying to literally name oneself — descended from people who were ripped away from their context in service of an insanely exploitative and very successful economic system, who had to sire new generations of giants on this Earth, who had to literally make up the story as they go and piece together a kind of language world to hold their being. So much of the fights of the postslavery and post-Jim Crow eras was about having to throw off the labels and stereotypes that were thrust upon them to build their own definition of self.
The whole point of political correctness, which is now demonized as an idea, was literally giving people the right to name themselves. Now, it’s this oppressive thing to ask people to be respectful when someone says what their name is. Among these various things that Black Americans have interfaced with are sexuality, mental competence, and mental health. I think this is about people trying to think their way into the form of life that best expresses who they are.
That might mean sometimes it runs contrary to the available labels that are there for you. How does anybody live their life when it feels like the options for naming yourself are so limited? How do you make new names for yourself? Especially for that younger generation, but also the older parents who have to find a new form for their lives now that they’re not the king and queen they thought they were going to be. The [older] son’s got to remake his life out of prison, the youngest son is trying to just be allowed to follow the impulses of who he is. Aziza wants to be a mom, without the trappings of what we think a mom should have.
It’s not about saying that asexual people are mentally disturbed. For me, it’s all about upending labels in every way. There are aromantic and asexual people I’ve since learned about. Black male representation on stage is always so complicated because it often comes down to some crazy sexual situation. There has to be a different way to talk about Black male emotionality, interiority, intimacy. In some ways, Naz was my attempt to sort of see where we could get with that.
It seems like we got pretty far, because [audiences] love Naz. It has struck up interesting conversations, but I wasn’t really that self-conscious about it when I was working on it. I just wanted to present a different mode. Of course, every [character] wants him to be what they need him to be so they can feel right in their story. It’s all about the story they tell themselves about being a loving person in relationship to Naz. For Aziza, he has to be someone who is in need of more resources than he’s been given. For Mom, he’s just someone who needed confidence and support, and the world wanted to name him something. The dad needs him to just come out as gay, but he’s not gay, and so he’s like, “What are you?”
That’s family, right? Family is always about appreciating everyone else’s expectations of you.
What a great, thoughtful conversation. This is really making me dig deep into my own experience of this (fantastic) play and my own family. Thank you.