AMERICAN THEATRE | Exploring an Ensemble’s ‘Purpose’

Standing in the Steppenwolf lobby during intermission of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s new play, Purpose, attendees were already having hushed conversations excitedly comparing the play to August: Osage County. I side-eyed the comment at the time, partly because of the long history of Black playwrights being continually compared to and held up against their white counterparts. Also, in the back of my mind sat Jacobs-Jenkins’s words, from an interview the day prior, in which he admitted that “it’s hard to work at Steppenwolf and not be in the shadow” of that particular Pulitzer-winning Tracy Letts play, which received its world premiere at the Chicago theatre in 2007.

But as I spoke with some of the cast, it became clear that there may be good reason to think about Purpose alongside its Steppenwolf predecessor—not by way of comparison, but rather as a way to place Purpose (which has been extended multiple times, most recently through May 12) in Steppenwolf’s storied lineage of art created for and around their storied acting ensemble. After all, this was a commission-to-production process that has seen three generations of Steppenwolf artistic leaders involved before making its way to stage. Co-artistic director Glenn Davis, who also performs in the show, theorized in an interview after opening that this process must have been what it felt like during the heyday of folks like John Malkovich, Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney, Laurie Metcalf, Amy Morton, and so many more who regularly trod Steppenwolf’s boards. Much as the life force of Steppenwolf’s acting ensemble combined with talented playwrights to create works like Grapes of Wrath and August: Osage County, Davis feels that the combination brought together for Purpose contains similar magic.

“When a writer of his caliber writes for us, I know something beautiful is going to happen,” Davis said of Jacobs-Jenkins, who has another family drama, Appropriate, now running on Broadway. “We’re going to bring something that he can work with, something that he can mold and shape around us, just in the way those other actors had writers writing for them.”

The notion of commissioning Jacobs-Jenkins to write for Steppenwolf began years ago, under the late artistic director Martha Lavey. The commission was later cemented by her successor, Anna D. Shapiro, and now the play is making its way to the stage under co-leaders Audrey Francis and Glenn Davis. When Steppenwolf approached first him to write a show for their ensemble, “Of course I said yes,” Jacobs-Jenkins recalled. He started by digging into Steppenwolf’s website, spending time looking at the faces of the Steppenwolf ensemble before zeroing in on Davis, Alana Arenas, and Jon Michael Hill. A huge fan of their work, he said he found himself really wanting to write a play where they could play members of a family.

What he came up with was a “reconsideration of a political dynastic family,” to borrow a phrase from The Blacklist actor and Chicagoan Harry Lennix, who plays Solomon “Sonny” Jasper, the patriarch of the show’s central family and a prominent Civil Rights leader who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and helped carry his work for succeeding generations. The sociopolitical drama follows the Jasper family over the course of a couple days in their house. From the matriarch and patriarch of the family to their two sons and daughter-in-law, everyone has secrets, and an explosive dinner scene featuring an unexpected guest threatens to tear the family apart—or perhaps bring them even closer together. Jacobs-Jenkins interrogates class, addresses themes of familial commitment and the challenges of forgiveness, and explores what it means to forge your own path within a family whose history is worthy of a place next to the likes of Dr. King and Malcolm X, all crafted around the assembled ensemble.

“I think it’s very difficult to write ensemble shows now, because the arc of our field commercially bends toward star vehicles,” Jacobs-Jenkins said. “That era of celebrating acting ensembles—it’s rare, and it’s rare to find opportunities to try to do that. But in some ways, those are my favorite plays. Those are Chekhov plays, those are some of my favorite Ibsen plays. Those are what August Wilson was doing. I mean, you think of Joe Turner, you think of Piano Lesson—part of the power of those is the ensemble nature of their construction.”

Indeed, in this case the ensemble was very much a part of the play’s construction, since, as Davis and other cast members recalled, they only had the first part of the script when everyone first dove in. 

“What you saw in that first act—that was what we essentially had, and I thought it was brilliant,” said Davis. “That’s why we decided to produce the play. I said, ‘If he lands the plane, if this second act is as good as his first, if he comes anywhere near the vicinity of what he’s done in this first act, I think we have something, something I haven’t seen in a very long time.’”

Jacobs-Jenkins explained that this is part of his process of discovery: He creates a world, asks actors to inhabit it, then sees what the things he’s brought in look, feel, and read like for them, gauging what makes sense. He noted that, to some extent, everything he’s written in the past has been tailored to certain actors. With his end goal in mind, he’ll make adjustments as they create something brand new together. He added that, especially for a family drama like this, a key to truly understanding a family is to have all the people in place. The casting of Lennix and Tamara Tunie as Solomon and Claudine, the heads of this particular household, “made a huge difference in shaping things.”

“The play was evolving as we were doing it,” said Tunie. “It was coming into existence as we were doing it. We are rehearsing scenes and playing our roles, but not knowing where it was going. We got on the train not knowing that the destination was, and it was kind of terrifying and thrilling and exhilarating at the same time.”

Lennix compared the process to his television experience, with writers who get to know both the characters and the actors who are playing them, who then take those learnings and apply them to the scripts. Davis echoed the sentiment, saying that there is “a sort of synthesis between Branden and the actor that comes into focus very, very quickly.”

According to Davis, the first act didn’t just sell him and the company on the play’s potential; it’s also what brought the legendary Phylicia Rashad (unavailable for this piece) on board to direct, a “dream come true,” as Davis put it. They wanted to bring in someone they trusted to take care of the characters Jacobs-Jenkins was working with, characters grounded in the stories and lives of real people both in the Civil Rights Movement and today. Tunie called Rashad “one of the most intuitive directors I’ve worked with on human behavior.”

“There was no one else who would’ve done what she did with this piece,” Davis added, pointing to not just her theatre prowess, but also the fact that Rashad herself performed as Violet in August: Osage County during its Broadway run. Especially for this kind of ensemble piece, it also made sense to bring in someone who really knew acting from the inside. Jacobs-Jenkins said he had a sort of “a-ha” moment working with Rashad, as he hadn’t worked with an actor-director before.

“I didn’t realize how much energy your average director spends trying to convince actors to trust them, which is part of the process,” Jacobs-Jenkins explained. “But when you’re someone who knows you’re the master of the craft and people know your work, that sort of distance is closed up immediately.”

As more pages came in and the characters continued to gain depth, Tunie said the play felt like an onion that got more and more complex as each layer was revealed. Speaking days after opening, Tunie said she was looking forward to spending more time with the show, continuing to deepen the understanding of its relationships and characters. After all, there’s a lot going on under the surface of this family, especially the two sons in the show played by Hill and Davis, who feel burdened with the legacy and publicity of their father’s career. Lennix compared the weight that can sit on the shoulders of family members in highly public Black families to the experiences of Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson Jr., and descendants of Malcolm X.

“I know some of these people from whom these characters are drawn, and I hope that it actually explains some things to people in a way,” said Lennix, whose portrait hangs prominently on an upper balcony wall, surrounded by Black luminaries like Martin Luther King Jr., as part of Todd Rosenthal’s scenic design. “[Solomon] refers to some of the people in the photographs of his house, on that wall, as some of the holiest people he’s ever met, and I’m sure there’s not one of them there or anywhere at any point of time that is not human and who has not had some failings that they had to overcome.”

Where Jacobs-Jenkins, Rashad, and ensemble ended up is with a play that deeply explores its title subject through the various eyes of its six-person ensemble. Everywhere you look in Purpose, there are detailed explorations of what it means to pursue your “purpose” in life, and what that pursuit looks like when a member of your family has become a symbol for the public.

“I want people to be able to walk away with more understanding of what the demands on such a family would be—somebody that’s two or three generations deep in terms of this struggle in the United States of America,” Lennix said. “If you’ve achieved greatness or notoriety on a certain level, what that does to children is a lot. Not just for Black people, but in particular for Black people. We’ve been here from the beginning of this American experiment, and very few of us have been allowed the access to the levers of power, the levers of influence like this family onstage. And that has an impact.”

In talking with Jacobs-Jenkins, he acknowledged that there have been a lot of conversations about models or precedents, both for the play’s subject matter and for the play itself. He said he looked to a pair of Augusts (Langford and Wilson) for the way they crafted ensemble dramas, and deeply examined subjects like social behavior, relationships, and intimacy. And he pointed to plays like Lydia Diamond’s Stick Fly, another work developed and premiered in Chicago that centered around a three-day weekend on Martha’s Vineyard for an affluent Black family. And, of course, there’s August: Osage County.

But the precedents on many people’s minds aren’t theatrical but political. On the night I saw the show, former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot was in the audience, and I couldn’t help but think about how the play landed with her, and about the impact her political career had on her family and those closest to her. As much as this play is a chance for audience members to consider their own family units and relationships, it also asks us to consider the pressure faced by families whose members find their purpose in public causes.

“We live in this funny space culturally where people become symbols,” said Jacobs-Jenkins, who has become something a public figure himself. “You really feel that in Chicago. That’s part of the culture of the politics here. How do you make space for the processing of that?”

Jerald Raymond Pierce (he/him) is the Chicago editor for American Theatre. jpierce@tcg.org

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