In the summer of 2013, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., scion of the civil rights leader, was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to wire and mail fraud in connection with his misuse of $750,000 of campaign funds. Simultaneously, his wife, Sandi, was sentenced to 12 months for signing her name on false tax returns concealing said crimes. The Jacksons did not serve their time together. A judge decided their kids should retain access to one parent. So Jesse went first, got out, and then his wife had to go. At the time, some of us wondered how much she’d really known about her husband’s schemes. Especially when a divorce followed.
The absolutely not-to-be-missed new Steppenwolf Theatre premiere from the white-hot Black playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “Purpose,” is fictional. But the show, directed by Phylicia Rashad, is set in what looks like Chicago’s Jackson Park Highlands neighborhood at the moment when an iconic civil rights leader who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., Solomon “Sonny” Jasper, played by Harry Lennix, and his enabling wife Claudine (Tamara Tunie) are celebrating their son’s “homecoming” from prison. That son, Solomon Jr. (Glenn Davis), has returned to Chicago with his furious wife, Morgan (Alena Arenas), who is on her way into prison for tax evasion, blaming her husband and his famous, brand-conscious family with every embittered breath. If that wasn’t enough to fire up the parallel, Sonny’s longtime slogan is not “Keep Hope Alive” but “Keep Hope Right Here.”
Our busy and charmingly self-aware narrator, who witnesses every scene, is the second son of the great leader, a maybe bipolar, apparently asexual loner named Nazareth (Jon Michael Hill) who has infuriated his father by quitting divinity school. He sheds his nepobaby status and prefers photographing Canadian lakes to civil rights politics. He’s shown up in Chicago with his unknowing queer pal Aziza (Ayanna Bria Bakari) whom he has just assisted as a dangerously informal sperm donor, an act outside the parental wheelhouse.
It’s snowing out, so none of these six people can leave Sonny’s house. Everyone sits down to an explosive dinner, much like the most famous episode of “The Bear.”
Let me stipulate that Rashad’s three-hour show was not fully ready at opening. I’d heard tell last week that new pages of the script were coming fast and furious from the writer in residence, and actors sometimes were insecure with lines even at Sunday’s official bow, a rarity here. The piece sags late in Act 2 when Jacobs-Jenkins wants to give everyone their moment in the spotlight, even at the expense of his own natural dramatic rhythm. Some transitions are too abrupt and a few judicious cuts are needed.
But those things are mere caveats at the birth of a truly great new Chicago play.
“Purpose,” which I don’t doubt will move to Broadway, is exactly why people go to see shows at the only American theater globally famous for its intensity. In a week or two, “Purpose” will be a three-hour barnstormer, a worthy comparison to “August: Osage County,” a companion piece to “Appropriate” (the fabulous Jacobs-Jenkins play burning up Broadway) and, most importantly, an impressive meditation on how a young generation of Black Americans are fighting the faith-based trajectory of their elders.
Jacobs-Jenkins is the writer of the moment because of his courage (who else would dare take care on this theme?) and his determination, unlike so many youthful peers, to never fully reveal authorial point of view. Every character here gets their say. All have their flaws. Each has valid grievances.
The performances all are poignant but the younger actors in this show are especially good: Hill finally has a role he has deserved for years, Arenas gets to unleash her inner Amy Morton, and the relative newcomer Bakari, playing the outsider at the homecoming of horrors, delivers a beautiful monologue about what happened to her generation during the pandemic summer of 2020, which is here thrown into a kind of counterpoint with the civil rights movement. What were those protests, the play asks? A social movement on the same scale as the march on Selma? Or a quickly receding fever dream, born of isolation and fear? Or both?
I was knocked out by how well “Purpose” got at one of the essential differences between 2020 and the 1960s — which is how, in 2020, a young generation of activists fused their desire for political change with a determination to radically alter their personal lives.
The purpose of “Purpose,” I think, is to be a play about finding your purpose (“Appropriate” is about discerning what’s appropriate, so clearly this is a thing). Purpose inevitably intersects with faith, of course, and the play comes off as agnostic at best, a believer in finding your grail, and letting your kids find theirs, however weird. Lennix clearly understands that. At one memorable moment, this veteran actor’s hands grasp at the air as his flailing patriarch gruffly announces “a new era of truths,” only to find out that any such declaration also has to apply to himself.
The play dances with the familiar: the catalyst of a stranger in a close-knit family, the spilling of family secrets at dinner, a circling of family wagons. The authorial sympathy for the left-out loner can also be seen in the works of Michael R. Jackson and James Ijames, both writers who rage against severe parents. There’s a lot of Tracy Letts’ influence on the dramatic side, not just “August” but “The Minutes,” as well as August Wilson when it comes to the comedy.
But “Purpose” is its own thing, a brilliant moralistic satire, which sounds deadly but not with a writer who prizes agency, currency and, thank god, ambiguity. This will get Chicago’s political classes chattering and should shoot struggling Steppenwolf back closer to where it belongs.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Purpose” (4 stars)
When: Through April 28
Where: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 3 hours
Tickets: $52-$116 at 312-335-1650 and www.steppenwolf.org
