In the dressing room of a Hell’s Kitchen rehearsal space, LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s voice is warm and her eyes are full of mischief. She’s freshly recovered from gallbladder surgery a few weeks prior, and her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, is in New Orleans, running lines for his surprise cameo in Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show. She refers to herself as a “blue-collar actress” (she also directed Samuel onstage in The Piano Lesson), but here she is preparing to introduce a new grande dame to Broadway: Claudine Jasper, the matriarch of Purpose, the latest work of irreverence and soul-searching by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.
“He’s the truth,” Richardson Jackson says of the playwright, tapping her index finger on her highlighted script. “It is hard for me to find beautiful writers like August Wilson. But comparatively? This boy, he’s got that extra lil’ something that God touches you with.”
In 2024, Jacobs-Jenkins won the Tony for the revival of Appropriate, his comedy about a white Arkansas family coming to terms with a closet full of Jim Crow skeletons. This season, he turns his attention to Chicago and the tensions swaddled within a domestic prison of upper-middle-class Black striverly discontent. Two-time Tony-winning actor Phylicia Rashad directs this production, developed at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. The show retains most of its original company, save for two roles: Aziza, a “friend” played by Kara Young (Purlie Victorious), and Claudine.
When we meet the Jaspers, they are a family in a transitional twilight they cannot perceive. A generational power struggle is afoot between the family patriarch, a pastorly civil-rights luminary named Solomon (Harry Lennix), and his disappointing namesake, Junior (Glenn Davis). Junior, a disgraced congressman who tripped over his own corruption and fell straight into prison, is once again a free man, and Claudine has delayed her birthday celebration so that it may double as a welcome-home party. His wife, Morgan (Alana Arenas), implicated in her husband’s embezzlement scheme, is observing her own countdown before she must report to the penitentiary. Nazareth (Jon Michael Hill), a professional photographer who abandoned divinity school in the final semester of his studies, narrates the action, which takes place as a winter storm approaches.
Nazareth struggles to feel a connection to his family and the weight of upholding the brand of Black Excellence the Jasper name telegraphs. He neglects to inform Aziza that she is driving her friend and Brooklyn neighbor from a photography assignment in Niagara Falls to a mausoleum of racial uplift. It’s not difficult to see why, once the family is gathered around the dining-room table and the audience becomes acquainted with what it truly means to be a Black first lady: the compromises and indignities they are required to swallow with grace, the blind eyes they are expected to turn as though nothing is wrong, the messes they are expected to launder and disappear. In short, Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, puts onstage what respectability politics dictates remains secret, highlighting the generational differences and the eruptive costs of maintaining an image of unblemished achievement.
“I guess I have an impishness that I can’t seem to shake, and she’s been willing to make discoveries and peel back layers all through the process,” Jacobs-Jenkins says of Richardson Jackson. “She’s kind of fearless in that way, and she’s just so trusting of Phylicia and myself as creators, which is honestly not easy to come by in an actor with her status.”
Rashad, 76, and Richardson Jackson, 75, are familiar with the trials of Black archetypal matriarchs, having feasted upon such characters for much of their careers, Rashad perhaps most notably as Claire Huxtable on The Cosby Show. Both women played A Raisin in the Sun’s Lena Younger on Broadway, a decade apart. The problems Jacobs-Jenkins gives the Jaspers are pulled from more than just headlines. At times, Solomon’s conflicts with Junior recall the struggles between Martin Luther King Sr. and his son at Ebenezer Baptist Church as King Jr. outpaced his father’s celebrity. For Richardson Jackson, who grew up in Atlanta and, like Coretta Scott, married a Morehouse man, and now reigns as one of the First Ladies of Black Hollywood and the Atlanta University Center, Purpose’s themes come naturally.
“I have not tried to infuse her historically with my life, but it is so me,” Richardson Jackson says of her parallels to Claudine. “What holds her together? Those are the kinds of questions I’m asking myself.”
In previews February 25 at the Hayes Theater.