Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Big Year of Purpose: Giving Broadway a Dose of 'Muscular Realism' and Actor Magic

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins loves actors—especially “bona fide theater actors” like the powerhouse cast in his six-time-Tony-nominated production of Purpose, directed by Phylicia Rashad and playing at the Hayes Theater on Broadway. It’s no surprise that the now Pulitzer Prize-winning play began as a 2015 commission at Chicago’s ensemble-driven Steppenwolf Theatre Company. When tasked with finding ensemble members to fill the play-to-be, Jacobs-Jenkins gravitated toward Jon Michael Hill, Glenn Davis and Alana Arenas, three “young upstarts at the company” at the time. In 10 years, each of these “virtuosic” actors—to use the playwright’s word—have built impressive resumes, Glenn Davis now even the co-artistic director of Steppenwolf, and all featured in the current Broadway production: Hill as youngest son Nazareth “Naz” Jasper, Davis as his politically disgraced older brother Solomon “Junior” Jasper and Arenas as Morgan Jasper, the wife Junior dragged down with him.

Observing Hill’s “magic powers” as a performer up close during an early workshop set the course for the entire play. As Jacobs-Jenkins recalls, “Jon has this thing where he instantly makes you care about him. He doesn't have to speak.” While listening to Hill read during those first rehearsals, the playwright suddenly imagined how much he’d love to see Hill play Tom Wingfield, the iconic narrator of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Inspired, he went home and wrote a version of the current play’s opening monologue. When Hill delivered the new text in rehearsal, Jacobs-Jenkins realized “this is the play,” and officially shifted the point of view from both brothers’ narration to Naz’s narration alone. With this newfound structure, the play found itself. “The whole play is so much about interiority,” he says. “How to trust what's inside of you and what and where you end and your family begins.”

Now making her Broadway directorial debut, Rashad led what felt like an enchanted process that started with the Steppenwolf production. “She is like no other person I've ever collaborated with,” says Jacobs-Jenkins. “Directors waste a lot of time trying to get actors to trust them, but when she talks, they all take out their notebooks and take notes—because she's a master actor.” Despite her royalty status, Jacobs-Jenkins attests that she is no diva. “Soft-spoken, gentle and patient” is how he characterizes her. "Any time someone asks for a picture, she stops unless she’s in a hurry.” And when Jacobs-Jenkins turned to Rashad with his just-finished draft on the eve of Steppenwolf previews and tentatively asked if she would stick with the play for what he hoped would be its next life, she assured him she would.

While some call Purpose a satire, Jacobs-Jenkins would never define his own play that way. Writing toward the Steppenwolf house style of “muscular realism,” he set out to write a family drama with characters that were true, not objects of ridicule. “Satire implies a lack of sincerity,” he says, “but there's a ton of sincerity in the play.” He’s honestly shocked that people find his work funny at all. “You know, I don't think I'm not a funny person or writer, but with some of these reactions, I'm like, ‘Oh my God, I didn't realize this was such a hoot!’”

Despite back-to-back seasons on Broadway—Appropriate, another family-focused drama, winning the 2024 Tony Award for Best Revival and Purpose putting him in contention to be only the third Black playwright in history (after Joseph A. Walker and August Wilson) to win the award for Best Play—Jacobs-Jenkins still feels in between worlds. “Are we the establishment now?” he recalls marveling to Lila Neugebauer, his Appropriate director who, just as he did, built her career on small, off-Broadway stages. “If you'd asked me a year ago if I'd be back on Broadway with a play, I would not have believed you. I just premiered the show in Chicago [Purpose premiered at Steppenwolf in March 2024], and it took Appropriate 10 years to get to Broadway. I just assumed that would be the rough pattern. And in some ways,” he adds, “I haven't really had time to process all of it.” Beyond the Broadway production, the year brought his 40th birthday, the birth of his second child (the week before tech) and the passing of his father.

Still, Jacobs-Jenkins says working on Purpose has truly been his “happy place,” especially because the process provided the opportunity to work with tried-and-true theater actors. He calls himself a “Kara Young early adopter,” having known the now Tony Award winner since her earliest roles in new plays across New York City, including “the girl on the left in a Stephen Adly Guirgis play,” he jokes. Young now plays Purpose’s outsider Aziza, a role she was offered at Steppenwolf, but turned down to play Lutiebell Gussie Mae Jenkins in the 2023 Broadway revival of Purlie Victorious—the role that earned her the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Play. “She's the real thing,” Jacobs-Jenkins says of Young. “She could have run away, but she didn't go to L.A. and never talk to us again. She's really sticking it out and she loves it. And it is beautiful.”

All of the playwright’s words, both written and spoken, aim to shine a light on his actors. Fittingly, aside from the nod for Best Play, the rest of the production’s Tony nominations are for the actors: Glenn Davis, Jon Michael Hill, Kara Young, Harry Lennix and LaTanya Richardson Jackson each received a nod (Arenas, the show’s one snubbed performer, Jacobs-Jenkins dubs “the best-kept secret of American theater.”) “A big part of why I do what I do is I love actors,” he says. “I love what they do.” In the final act of the play, Jacobs-Jenkins has patriarch Solomon Jasper (Lennix) deliver an admiring speech about the way bees go through life with a distinct purpose. From off-Broadway to Broadway and beyond, it’s clear the playwright has found his own—writing great works and “making parts for actors” with the best and brightest collaborators he can find.