Purpose
Opening Night: March 17, 2025
Theater: Helen Hayes Theatre
Website: purposeonbroadway.com
For decades, the influential Jasper family has been a pillar of Black American Politics: civil rights leaders, pastors and congressmen. But like all families, there are cracks and secrets just under the surface. When the youngest son Nazareth returns home with an uninvited friend in tow, the family is forced into a reckoning with itself, its faith and the legacies of Black political power and familial duty. Spirited, hilarious and filled with intrigue, PURPOSE is an epic family drama from one of the country’s most celebrated voices.
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March 17, 2025
You may have trouble catching your breath from laughing so hard during the first act of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sophomore Broadway outing, “Purpose,” which opened Monday at the Helen Hayes Theater. Deeply imagined and grave beneath its yucks, it unspools like a brilliant sitcom.
Then, also like a sitcom, it jumps the shark.
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March 18, 2025
Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ latest is a feast of the good stuff — crackling dialogue, powerhouse ensemble acting and weighty themes delivered with biting naturalism.
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March 17, 2025
It’s a fascinating treatise on respectability, conservatism, preservation and legacy which, in Jacobs-Jenkins fashion, is also an enthralling drama which draws the most biting comedic blood from its human tragedy.
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March 17, 2025
Purpose has arrived as Americans contemplate the dissolution of all things that once seemed permanent. Timely though it may be, it also seems destined to take its place among the greatest American dramas of all time.
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March 17, 2025
A breathtaking production that beautifully blends drama and comedy, it is a searing tale that unveils the disconnect between how people see themselves and who they truly are.
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March 17, 2025
Much of the nearly mathematical pleasure of watching Purpose lies in watching a top-tier craftsman set up and then launch one long domino chain of familial discord.
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March 17, 2025
There are other reasons to see “Purpose” beyond its awards potential. For those of us too young to have seen Laurette Taylor in “The Glass Menagerie,” there is now the opportunity to see LaTanya Richardson Jackson in “Purpose.”
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March 17, 2025
But above all, of course, the show works because of Jacobs-Jenkins’s writing, which is probing without losing its humor and bracingly honest without being cruel.
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Purpose buzzes with rich ideas about sons and fathers and the burdens of legacy, sexuality, and authenticity. Solomon Sr.’s passion for beekeeping cleverly drives home the point of the play’s title. Purpose dazzles and stings.
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There’s a buzz running through the Hayes Theater throughout the almost three hours of Purpose, an unmistakable signal of the engagement we crave from live performance.
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On it goes, for a while making sense of the family’s accumulating dysfunctions and crescendoing toward a delicately plotted finale. But Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t know when to stop. He continues piling on nasty disturbances and ugly revelations so that he haphazardly risks audience resistance.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 17, 2025
In the end, “Purpose” is a major new American play about what it’s like to be trapped by powerful parents whose public personas their children can easily see through, even as they are condemned to try and live up to their import. A thumping blend of tragic-proximate horror and schadenfreude, it’s riveting to watch.
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March 17, 2025
With his latest effort, “Purpose,” the playwright does more than maintain his momentum: He secures his place as Broadway’s most incisive and scathingly entertaining chronicler of family and social dysfunction — an inheritor to American giants stretching from Eugene O’Neill to Tracy Letts, but with a voice and perspective that are distinctly of this moment.
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