Big, influential families have long been of interest to Jacobs-Jenkins: Growing up in Washington, DC, he found that at every turn, there was “a very high chance that you were brushing up against a family that had some connection to political pull or power.” (Jacobs-Jenkins’s mother, a businesswoman, briefly worked in government during the Reagan administration; his father, who died earlier this year, was a dentist in Maryland’s correctional system.) Such families were also the basis for some of his favorite plays—those doughty ensemble pieces, focused on a single setting over a short span of time, created by the likes of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, and more recently, Tracy Letts and Lydia Diamond. Perusing the robust list of actors on Steppenwolf’s website, Jacobs-Jenkins imagined casting Davis, Hill, and Arenas—all of whom he had seen onstage before and been impressed by—as siblings. “That was truly all I had at the beginning,” he says.
While Chicagoans will (and did) interpret Junior and Morgan as fictionalized versions of former congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. and his ex-wife, Sandi, a local politician (both served staggered sentences related to Jackson’s misuse of campaign funds), those less in tune with that city’s political scandals will have a dozen other ways into the story—the pressures of belonging to a dynasty, the tricky work of forging a meaningful legacy, the differences between the activism of the 1960s and the unrest of the 2020s, and sundry notions of privilege, complicity, loyalty, manipulation, and failure.
Significant themes all, but Purpose, like the rest of Jacobs-Jenkins’s work, has a lot of humor. Indeed, its tonal balance feels of a piece with the playwright’s personality—erudition and prudent attention to identity and representation leavened with irreverent nods to his throat chakra, The Artist’s Way, and teen soaps on The WB. (When I ask what kind of performers he was drawn to as a young man, he deadpans, “I don’t want to sit here and pretend I was watching Truffaut movies when I was 14. I was really into Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”)
“When Branden was commissioned almost, I want to say, nine years ago now, he wasn’t the Branden Jacobs-Jenkins that we know today, who’s a ‘genius grant’ winner and a Tony Award winner,” says Davis. “He was just a great writer, a young writer that everyone was watching to see what he would create.” After participating, along with Hill and Arenas, in a series of workshops—at the time, Jacobs-Jenkins had about 40 pages written—it was Davis who, upon taking over from Anna D. Shapiro as Steppenwolf’s artistic director in 2021, actually programmed Purpose for the 2023–24 season. “It was the first play that myself and my partner, Audrey Francis, said, We want to do this,” Davis says.
