Tony-winner ‘Purpose’ succeeds on the backs of its matriarchs

Following six Tony nominations and two wins, the Pulitzer Prize-winning family drama “Purpose is losing its on-stage matriarch.

LaTanya Richardson Jackson will perform with the original Broadway cast for the last time July 13, as the show heads toward the end of its run on August 31. Brenda Pressley, who replaces her, has a long Broadway tenure that includes “Dreamgirls” and “Cats.”

“Purpose,” the play from “Appropriate” playwright and Tony winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins borrows from the lives of civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson and other powerful Black figures to create a family drama set on one weekend in Chicago with the Jasper family.

Working alongside patriarch Solomon who marched with Rev. Martin Luther King, Claudine, played by Richardson Jackson has kept the family legacy alive from behind the scenes. Naz, their youngest and more free-spirited son, narrates the audience through the tension-filled belated birthday weekend for his mother.

Not fond of coming home to Chicago or sharing his famous lineage, Naz is nonetheless there to celebrate both his mother and his brother Junior, a state senator recently released from prison for embezzlement.

Junior’s wife Morgan, the mother of their two kids who is set to head to prison herself, is not thrilled to be there either. This is the drama that greets Naz’s friend Aziza from Harlem who tagged along for the ride. Beneath the illusions of Black Excellence, she learns just how complex prominence and legacy can really be.

“Purpose” is also filled with new history all its own, even if it stings. Its Tony win for Best Play is the first in nearly 40 years for a Black playwright since August Wilson won it with “Fences” in 1987, a distinction Branden Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t find flattering.

“It’s a little bit embarrassing that I have to be that person because I was three years old when that happened, and I currently have a four-year-old daughter,” Jacobs-Jenkins told NBC News.

“There are folks who have been in contention,” he added — save for 2018 and 2021, a play by a Black playwright has been nominated every year since 2016.

Jacobs-Jackson was not the only person on the crew making milestones. Two-time Tony winner Phylicia Rashad, who signed on when the script just had 30 pages according to Jacobs-Jenkins, made her Broadway directorial debut. Tony winner Kara Young earned her fourth straight Tony nomination and second win as Aziza, with the latter making her the first Black actor to win back-to-back Tonys. Richardson Jackson, who made her Broadway directorial debut with the 2022 revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” earned her second Tony nomination. Jon Michael Hill earned his second Tony nomination as Naz. Playing father and son Solomon and Junior, Harry Lennix and Glenn Davis both earned their first Tony nominations.

As matriarchs of the stage, Rashad and Richardson Jackson are key factors to the show’s success, Jacobs-Jenkins and Young said.

“I would argue that she’s one of the most important theater artists working today,” Jacobs-Jenkins said of Rashad. “She’s someone who has worked with some of the most important theater artists in the twentieth century and the twenty-first century. She was in the room with Michael Bennett during [the] ‘Dreamgirls’ original company. She was in the original company of ‘The Wiz.’”

Richardson Jackson, Young said, “has been such a beautiful pioneer in the American theater . . . she’s incredibly remarkable. She’s a part of the legacy of ‘For Colored Girls,’ and she was Douglas Turner Ward’s assistant director. She’s part of a lot of the foundational parts of Black theater in a really special way.”

In addition to playing Junior on stage, Davis, also co-artistic director at Steppenwolf, helped originate the production. He said he believes “Purpose” truly does have a legacy of its own worth celebrating.

“In the specificity of what Brandon has written and what Miss Phylicia Rashad has directed, they have created something so indelible and so clearly outlined in terms of these characters and their motivations and their ideas and notions about themselves in the world that people who don’t look like them necessarily still see the human experience. And so, in that respect, they see themselves.”