Black Excellence: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Purpose, a new play now on Broadway, has all the trappings of the classic family drama: A powerful and aging patriarch, wayward sons, a strategizing wife and a watchful outsider. It could be about monarchs.
Instead, the latest work from Tony-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins trains its lens on a family with deep roots in the American civil rights movement grappling with the impact of that very history on them and on society at large.