In discussing his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Purpose,” playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has cited what he calls the “crisis of purpose” that confronts members of the Black American family at the heart of this piercing story.
Loosely inspired by the Jesse Jackson family, the Jaspers of “Purpose” encounter the unexpected and the contentious on what was to be a snowy, celebratory weekend in their Chicago home. Patriarch Solomon Jasper, a religious, politically-minded champion of the Civil Rights Movement, finds himself deeply at odds with his sons Junior and Nazareth (nicknamed “Naz”), the former just out of prison, the latter “just” a nature photographer. Also around the dinner table are Solomon’s protective wife Claudine, Junior’s prison-bound wife Morgan, and Aziza, the friend “Naz” brings to the house. Emotions run high. Secrets are revealed. Personal legacies explored.
Under the direction of Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, La Jolla Playhouse is producing the West Coast premiere of “Purpose,” which was commissioned by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre then went to Broadway and won not only the Pulitzer Prize for Drama but also the Tony Award for Best Play last year.
Delicia Turner Sonnenberg will direct August Wilson’s “Fences” for The Old Globe this spring. (Eduardo Contreras / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
“One of my favorite things as a director,” said Turner Sonnenberg, “is an intimate story told against a broad backdrop – in this case the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and the legacy of it for this particular family. The legacy of this family and the movement are part of the story, but it is a family play. It’s the foundation.
“The process of the play is going from the image of this family to who they really are as individuals, to their truths. Digging away to reveal what’s beneath the image.”
the cast of La Jolla Playhouse’s “Purpose,” from left to right, Martha Boles (understudy), Andréa Agosto (“Aziza Houston”), Antonio TJ Johnson (understudy), Stephanie Berry (“Claudine Jasper”), Cornell Womack (“Solomon ‘Sonny’ Jasper”), Sean Boyce Johnson (“Solomon ‘Junior’ Jasper”), Vandous Stripling II (understudy), Crystal Dickinson (“Morgan Jasper”) and Matthew Elijah Webb (“Nazareth ‘Naz’ Jasper”). (La Jolla Playhouse)
Matthew Elijah Webb, who’s playing Naz in La Jolla, calls the character “probably the closest to myself that I’ve experienced in a play, both as an audience member and as an actor. He’s a queer person. So am I. He grew up in a very faith-forward household that has specific ideas about what it is to be a man, what is necessary of a man, especially as it pertains to relationships.”
“It’s similar to the family I grew up in. I grew up with the rhetoric that a man has to be with a woman and that parents want you to be your most successful, and being a creative isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. The conversations that Naz has with Solomon are quite similar to the feelings I had when I was growing up.”
For Webb, the similarity doesn’t end there.
“The support that Naz has from Junior, his older brother, is the same support I have from my older brother, the protectiveness that his mom has is the same that my mom has over me despite the fact that she still feels this isn’t the most holy thing you can be doing.”
The cast of in La Jolla Playhouse’s production of “PURPOSE,” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Delicia Turner Sonnenberg. (Samantha Laurent)
The lesson learned for Naz, Webb says, is the same he’s learned for himself: “There is liberation in existing in one’s true self.”
The Naz character is the narrator of “Purpose,” breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience. “Buckle up,” he tells them ominously.
“Naz is really the shepherd of this story,” Webb said. “He brings the audience along. He needs them to understand as he is trying to understand what is happening on this weekend.”
Like Webb, director Turner Sonnenberg encountered parallels to her own life when seeing “Purpose” on Broadway.
“It hit me right where I live,” she recalled. “My childhood elementary school field trip was to the MLK Memorial. My grandmother was like ‘I went to jail with Martin Luther King.’ This idea of being in close proximity to the generation that marched, that fought, that went to jail as my grandmother did protesting for equal rights, resonates personally with me, and also being from Atlanta where a lot of the people from the movement stayed, like Andrew Young.
“They moved from that movement into politics, and I was growing up right in that time.”
For all its weightiness, “Purpose” is filled with humorous dialogue and moments of lightness.
“Branden (Jacobs-Jenkins) is really a genius,” said Webb, “the way that he weaves language together. He has the gift of making ordinary circumstances feel extraordinary. He’s touted to be this playwright who’s really skilled at quick-fire, funny dialogue, who can make things light and disarm the audience for just a moment before he hits you with something that grounds you in this reality.”
Turner Sonnenberg considers the play “outrageously funny, not for the characters but for us, the audience, and it’s deeply moving. There are real stakes and real loss. The writing is just exquisite. It’s a world that has a little bit of pain in it. It is beautiful and painful.”
At the Playhouse the “Purpose” cast includes Cornell Womack as Solomon “Sonny” Jasper, Stephanie Berry as Claudine, Sean Boyce Johnson as Junior, Crystal Dickinson as his wife Morgan, and Andréa Agosto as Aziza Houston.
After seeing “Purpose” in New York, then reading the play “I fell even more in love with it,” Turner Sonnenberg said. “And I got this cast and I’m now deeply in love. I’m a fan of the playwright’s use of language. I see my job as a director as communicating intent to an audience. It has little to do with me and more to do with getting all the collaborators – everybody – all telling the same story.”
The story, in part, is that “crisis of purpose” that Jacobs-Jenkins talked about.
“That’s what stuck out to me right before I came to rehearsal,” Turner Sonnenberg said. “What does that mean in terms of each of the people in the play? In their relationships to each other and to themselves?”
Asked whether she’s experienced her own crisis of purpose, Turner Sonnenberg thought back on her 20s when “she felt like I was purposeless. I tried on a lot of different hats.” Then she was told by someone wise that “You’re not who you’re supposed to be until you’re 30.”
“From that time on,” she said, “I started striving for 30.”
‘Purpose’
When: Previews begin Tuesday, May 12. Opens next Sunday, May 17. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 1 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through June 7.
Where: La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, UCSD
Tickets: $30-$94
Phone: 858-550-1010
Online: lajollaplayhouse.org