Purpose - Play

Purpose gathers the Jasper family around a Chicago dinner table on the night the eldest son comes home from prison, and a snowstorm shuts the door behind an uninvited guest. By the end of the evening, a family built on public virtue is saying out loud what it has spent decades not saying.

Solomon Jasper is a reverend and civil rights icon whose name still carries weight in Black American politics; his wife, Claudine, is a lawyer who set aside her own practice to guard his reputation. Their elder son, Junior, a former state senator, has served time for spending campaign money on himself; his wife, Morgan, waits to begin her own sentence. Naz, the younger son, left divinity school to photograph lakes and mist, and narrates the night from its edge.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins wrote the play for Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where it premiered in 2024 before reaching Broadway the following year. It won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play, along with the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and a Drama Desk Award. Jacobs-Jenkins is also the author of Appropriate and An Octoroon.

The writing is very funny until it is not. A joke lands, then curdles, and the laugh in one row meets silence in the next. Faith, ambition, obligation, mental health and the private cost of a public reputation are all argued across the same table, and nobody in the room is allowed to be simply right. The comedy is what makes the reckoning bearable.

Purpose speaks to anyone who has inherited a name, a faith or an expectation and wondered what it costs to carry. Held in one room across a single night, the argument plays out in front of the audience with nowhere for anyone to hide.