Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on the inspiration for 'Purpose,' his Tony-winning family drama

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz: It’s been quite a few months for 40-year-old writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, with his play “Purpose” winning both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and Tony Award for best play.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talked with him recently at Broadway’s Hayes Theater for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Actress: Somebody hurry up and bless this food.

Jeffrey Brown: A dinner with the Jasper family.

Actor: Heavenly father.

Jeffrey Brown: It brings out a few issues.

Actor: I don’t know why I thought. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Jeffrey Brown: Some minor tensions.

Actor: No, son, why don’t you go on ahead? You are, apparently, the guest of honor.

Actor: No, father, that was just me on autopilot. You are the head of this family.

(Laughter)

Actor: Buckle up.

Jeffrey Brown: Now the play “Purpose” is bringing Branden Jacobs-Jenkins some major honors.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Playwright: It’s very surreal, though, because I turn around and it’s my name and then Pulitzer Prize for drama. It’s just ridiculous.

Jeffrey Brown: But it’s real.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: It’s real. No, it’s happening. It’s here all the time. Even when I’m not here, this is here, apparently.

I’m someone who have always loved the theater. I have been going to theaters since I was single digits. And it’s been the source of so much revelation and warmth and comfort and learning in my life. And all I really want to do is honor the theater’s power to do that.

Jeffrey Brown: “Purpose” was originally commissioned by and performed at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, renowned for its ensemble acting, much on display here.

Actress: I’m going to need you to give me what I want.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: And it’s directed by famed actress Phylicia Rashad, making her Broadway directing debut. It introduces us to a prominent Black family led by a now aging civil rights icon whose time has passed and whose disappointment in his two sons is openly shown.

But there’s plenty of anger and hypocrisy to go around, as well as a fierce love, with each family member experiencing a crisis of purpose.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I like to think about what it would mean to have a crisis of purpose. What does that feel like for people? Would it force you to do or be or act in some way that was outside of yourself?

Jeffrey Brown: What do you mean you like to think about that? Because that gives you a way into characters.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, totally. I mean, yes, I mean, all you’re doing, I think, is trying to build people, build these illusions of people that actors will inhabit and you want to build them with as much specificity and kind of novelty as you can.

Jeffrey Brown: Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays often explore American identity through a lens of race, family and history. “Appropriate” about a dysfunctional white family facing secrets of its racist past won three Tonys last year.

“Purpose” takes the classic theme of theater going back to Greek tragedy, the powerful family torn apart, and sets it in our world.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I was interested in kind of picking that thread up in this contemporary moment, because, historically, you don’t see a lot of representation of Black folks in those spaces ever. I think there’s a really strong tradition of looking at the working class, looking at the — August Wilson did a whole encyclopedia of this for us in the 20th century, Lorraine Hansberry.

And I just felt like there was something worth exploring about the rest of that forest.

Jeffrey Brown: But that forest is one very funny place.

Actress Kara Young also won a Tony for her performance as Aziza, an outsider her with her own secret, here just realizing whose home she’s in.

Kara Young, Actress: You said your daddy was some sort of reverend, but not like this kind of reverend, not like a I organized marches reverend, not like I used to kick it with Rosa Parks reverend, not like an MLK shrine in the living room reverend.

(Laughter)

Kara Young: And did his son go to jail? Wait, that’s your brother? Wait. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

(Laughter)

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: The power of any sort of storytelling is about giving people the widest experience of emotions possible in a very contained moment. So I do recognize it’s very funny. I like that it’s funny. I like an audience laughing because I think it’s an audience telling you they’re listening. They feel connected and they open up.

But also I do think it’s about those swerves into — that’s just to me the experience of life is the laughter and the pain. And if you can kind of capture that for an audience, you bring them very close to an idea of what life is.

Actor: Aziza here is a friend of Nazareth’s.

Actress: Is that so?

Actor: A special friend.

Jeffrey Brown: And then there’s that dinner scene, which starts innocently, but where all the family secrets eventually come spinning out of control.

Actress: Well welcome, Aziza. Beware.

Jeffrey Brown: What is it about the dinner table?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Totally. I mean, it’s a really — I thought a lot about this, because, yes, that dinner table scene does seem to be like a thing, which I love. I wonder if it’s because everybody has the same need.

Jeffrey Brown: What, like to eat or to drink?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Yes, we’re all hungry. So, it’s like you’re all you’re all at the table because you’re hungry and that’s why you stay at the table. So much drama is like, why do they stay in the room? Why do they stay in this fight? A dinner table is pretty functional. Everyone’s kind of hungry. And that’s enough.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s a family story, but also a larger American story. Jacobs-Jenkins says he wanted the grounding of the civil rights movement and its achievements in order to raise questions about attempts to roll them back, where we are now and how we got here.

That, he says, is part of his purpose.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I really do see myself in the tradition of playwrights, which is someone who volunteered to hold a mirror up to the audience that came up to see it and gave people a space in which to exercise their emotional life, to kind of hear and debate and can feel their values, the social values.

Jeffrey Brown: “Purpose” runs through August 31.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown on Broadway.