'Purpose' arrives at Geffen Playhouse with its Tony-winning Broadway cast intact

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Set us as preferred The family drama is a distinct American genre— one at which playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins excels.His 2013 show, “Appropriate,” about a prominent Arkansas clan that discovers old photos tying their deceased paterfamilias to a Jim Crow era lynch mob, won a Tony Award for best revival two years ago.

Jacobs-Jenkins soon topped that by winning the 2025 Pulitzer Prize along with a Tony for best drama for his next play, “Purpose,” which unfolds during a snow day in the Chicago home of a prominent civil rights leader named Solomon Jasper.That production is making its Los Angeles premiere at Geffen Playhouse, beginning Wednesday and running through Dec.20.

The Broadway and Steppenwolf Theatre Company production features the same Tony-nominated and Tony-winning team as it had in New York, including director Phylicia Rashad and actor Kara Young, who won a Tony for best featured actress for her portrayal of Aziza, a social worker who ends up in the middle of the family conflict at the heart of the play.“I feel like we’re always using family as a metaphor.It’s always a stand-in for some American crisis,” Jacobs-Jenkins said in a recent Zoom interview from New York.

“This is something I discovered when I was working on ‘Appropriate,’ every major family drama you can think of is animated in some way by anxieties of race and class.Ultimately, this is your tribe and you gotta figure out where your tribe’s value lives and what challenges that tribe’s value.”The “Purpose” tribe was inspired by an array of prominent political families, but the one most commonly referenced by audiences is that of civil rights icon Jesse Jackson.

Like Jackson, Solomon (Harry Lennix), is a former clergyman and old-school activist, while his son, Solomon Jr.(Glenn Davis), is a disgraced politician fresh from serving prison time for mishandling campaign funds.

Junior’s estranged wife, the b...