Theater review
PURPOSE
Two hours and 50 minutes, with one intermission. At the Hayes Theater, 240 West 44th Street.
Plays about families coming home — and coming to blows — are a workhorse of American drama.
The dinner-table clashes are reliably entertaining, easy to connect to and, you’d think, totally wrung-out by now.
How can anybody freshen up something so old-hat? There are only so many ways to cook a Norman Rockwell turkey.
Yet, in recent years, writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has managed to write not one, but two extraordinary examples: “Appropriate,” which snagged last year’s Tony Award for Best Play and “Purpose,” which opened Monday night at the Hayes Theater.
His latest firecracker is unstoppably fierce, funny — and ruthless.
I howled all the way through Jacobs-Jenkins’ clever and venomous spin on the story: This particular bombshell-littered house belongs to the Jaspers, a powerful black political dynasty whose controversies and scandals come down faster than the blizzard outside their window.
If your family is anything like them, I’d recommend emancipation.
The salt-and-pepper-haired dad, Solomon (Harry Lennix), is obviously modeled on Jesse Jackson. He does not orate from behind a podium, though, but fumes behind closed doors.
This imposing patriarch is also a famous minister and was an activist alongside Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement.
Disgracing the Jasper name is his fresh-out-of-prison eldest son, Solomon Jr. (Glenn Davis), a state senator taken down for embezzling money.
Orange jumpsuits are all the rage. Junior’s wife Morgan (Alana Arenas) is herself about to head to clink for conspiring with him.
And the youngest son Nazareth (Jon Michael Hill), a sensitive nature photographer, has returned for a visit with his New York friend Aziza (Kara Young), who doesn’t realize the storm she’s walking into.
Secrets are bared, stitches are violently ripped off, lives are turned upside down. You know the drill.
But because of Jacobs-Jenkins’ hyper-specific writing and unique take, the clan’s “blood is thicker than water” motivations and chilling Cosa Nostra antics provide plenty of sharp turns. Even when “Purpose” briefly sags in Act 2, we are still invested.
Set-ups don’t come much juicier. How does a revered national figure behave when reporters and cameras are not around? What do his screwed-up kids really think of him? Imagine a birthday dinner where the chat-chat — and tit for tat — has front-page repercussions.
“Purpose,” directed by Phylicia Rashad, who knows her way around a fictional living room, is dreamily cast.
A dynamite LaTanya Richardson Jackson, as Solomon’s bubbly-then-bruising wife Claudine, shows who’s really the boss. Arenas is the image of a rising politician’s beleaguered spouse, donning indoor sunglasses she might’ve borrowed from Hillary or Huma. And jovial Davis makes us believe he could win an election on the force of his personality… and last name.
Lennix, just like Jesse Jackson, comes from a vanishing world where a deep, resonant voice can silence a room with a few words.
And what a star Kara Young is. Fresh off her Tony win for “Purlie Victorious,” the hilarious actress, playing a woman in awe of these nightly news celebrities, practically puppeteers the audience with comedy — until she breaks them.
Our guide to this messed-up manse is Naz. Sweetly and compassionately played by Hill, he’s the closest the Jaspers come to normal. And he makes hilarious asides about his wealthy convict relatives like he’s Ron Howard on “Arrested Development.”
One of Naz’s suggestions succinctly sums up this highlight of the Broadway season: “Buckle up.”
