urban excavations

Purpose
Featuring Alana Arenas, Glenn Davis, Jon Michael Hill, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix, and Kara Young
Helen Hayes Theater
February 25, 2025 – July 6, 2025
production site

Purpose on Broadway plays as a television sitcom, which shocked me after reading and enthusiastically championing the play script for consideration for the 2025 Steinberg-ATCA New Play award the playscript ultimately won for its world premiere Steppenwolf production in 2024. The Steppenwolf version read to me on the page as a play with humor, led by a thunderous and charming matriarch who facilitates the work of the patriarch, and their towering legacies of obligation, guilt, responsibility, reputation, and sibling rivalries. The Broadway script includes some tweaks but the overall structure is retained, and the production often baffled me, finding raucous laugh lines where I felt pain for the characters, taking an audience tuned to a laugh- every-10-lines rhythm to undercut numerous moments of deep character reveal.

The Jaspers of Chicago are headed by Paster Solomon “Sonny” (the thundering Harry Lennix), who marched with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., often had leaders of the civil rights movement at the very dining table that is downstage stage right evoking another Steppenwolf family drama. (August Osage County with its own sweeping set of stairs and another downstage right dining table was also designed by Todd Rosenthal for another pivotal mid-play dinner scene in that work.) Wife Claudine (one note LaTanya Richardson Jackson) rules the home front and uses her legal training to manage any challenges to the supremacy of her family’s legacy, from criminal behavior to illegitimate children to ignored mental health problems.

Junior (passive Glenn Davis), the older of two sons, has failed in his assigned role as successor to his father’s political and pastoral legacy by a state senator then embezzling campaign funds for which he has now served time. His wife Morgan (powerhouse Alana Arenas) is about to serve her sentence for her signature on the problematic tax returns the family forced her to sign (they have sequential terms in order to parent their young children, in an not uncommon arrangement for parents sentenced after being convicted of crimes). Morgan wants a divorce, Claudine wants to keep the marriage intact, and for a long time it is quite unclear what Junior wants or whether he can articulate his desires at all, given how battered he is by his parents’ expectations. Second son Nazareth “Naz” (skittish and delectable Jon Michael Hill) has arrived as beckoned — he was assigned to be the next in line divinity school graduate, but he nixed that to be come a nature photographer. He brings his friend Aziza (always splendid Kara Young) who isn’t a girlfriend at all but a lesbian pal for whom Naz has agreed to provide his sperm for her own child, with no expectations that for him to co-parent.

We meet at that downstage dining table for a dinner Claudine has arranged to celebrate Junior’s release, and the family assembles to reveal all their issues. Junior is cowed by, well, everyone, and who knows what he has endured in prison. Naz reveals he is asexual or ambivalently sexual and my goodness the woman his family believes is his girlfriend is carrying his child. Morgan appears at the table at times of her own choosing, not because she is being petulant but she is scheming her next move. Having sacrificed her own law license due to the family financial shenanigans and her forced signature on papers that made her complicit, her only interest is in serving her needs and ensuring the future of her children before she goes off to actually serve time. And Aziza tells stories of her family’s worship of the Jasper family legacy, a legacy that is later tarnished in her eyes by all she learns and sees.

This is a lot of backstory and not the whole of it, a lot of plot in the playing of the production on stage much less in any analysis of the play itself or any production’s strengths and weaknesses. When, you may legitimately ask, does the present action, the action in “now” time begin? Well into the first third of the play is the answer, and getting to that point can seem long, full of well crafted jokes and banter, establishing the sitcom feel early on that’s hard to shake and for me, in this production, I and my audience couldn’t shake.

Naz serves as our moderator for this family drama, gives backstory, sets up the next scene, reflects to us in direct address his own character’s feelings. His monologues tell us of the autism the family chose to ignore, and his embrace of his own a-sexuality or at best indifferent sexuality. And powerfully for me, a passage that on the page riveted me near the end of the play that provides a climax (if you will) for Naz’s reveal to father Sonny what he loves about nature photography and how it gives him sensual pleasure, is a passage of home, of loving embrace of himself, of sharing his true self with his father. In my audience, this passage in the scene between father and son was greeted with full-throated sitcom laughter, by an audience who was no longer listening to the words, to a son’s cri de cœur, a deepest sharing with his estranged father, but rather was waiting for the next laugh line and found the idea of sensual pleasure in the beauty of the outdoors simply hilarious. This moment, in a play of many wonders, captured my sense of the missteps in directing this perhaps overstuffed play I so admire.

© Martha Wade Steketee (March 18, 2025)

Playwright | Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Director | Phylicia Rashad
Set Design | Todd Rosenthal
Costume Design | Dede Ayite
Lighting Design | Amith Chandrashaker
Sound Design| Rob Milburn + Michael Bodeen