By Aden Zaki
Image Credit: Prudence Upton
A family reunion is disrupted by an outsider who provokes invisible tensions to bubble before they pop. It’s a tried and tested recipe for melodrama that Purpose delivers on, although perhaps at the expense of political nuance.
Nazareth Jasper (Tinashe Mangwana), our narrator, is coming home to celebrate his mother Claudine’s (Deni Gordon) belated birthday. Celebrations have been put on hold while his brother (Maurice Marvel Meredith), a prominent congressman convicted of tax fraud, serves the remainder of his sentence. His wife Morgan (Grace Bentley-Tsibuah), embroiled in these crimes, is less than excited to see him; the end of his time in prison means the imminent dawn of her own, based on a deal they brokered to serve their sentences in succession. Crashing the party is Nazareth’ friend Aziza (Sisi Stringer), a social worker from Harlem who gets trapped by a snowstorm while dropping him home. Nazareth has just agreed to be Aziza’s sperm donor, and she could have never guessed who future grandfather is: Solomon Jasper Senior (Markus Hamilton), an ex-radical leader of the civil rights movement and beacon of “black excellence” with ties to all the most influential black families in America. Over the next twenty-four hours she watches the family unravel, although it seems this unraveling might be less the result of their contradictory class status, and more so of one father’s crushing expectations.
Solomon is caught in a bind between his expectations and his desperation for truth. Like any patriarch, Solomon has great expectations for his offspring. Junior was supposed to honour his political legacy in congress, while Nazareth was meant to live the life of spiritual cultivation he never was able to. Of course, neither of the boys can fulfill their roles. And to curb his disappointment, they live their lives in secret. Nazareth refuses to share his work as a nature photographer and his innermost thoughts are reserved for us, the audience, delivered in his narration. Solomon is frustrated by all this secrecy, and yet he refuses to acknowledge it, or, for that matter, any secrets of his own.
It looks like a perfect setup for an outsider like Aziza to come in and unravel things. But, surprisingly, she fits right in. She already idealises the man who runs the house; in the background of one of Nazareth’s expository monologues, she runs around the stage giddy, taking selfies with the MLK shrine in their living room, and filming a Tiktok dance in front of a hanging portrait of Solomon himself. She is blind to any friction between Solomon’s class status and his radical past. In fact, she finds their beautiful home and connections to other wealthy, influential families aspirational. The only tension that arises between her and Solomon is about Nazareth’s sexual identity – more of a generational misunderstanding than a political disagreement.
So Aziza is not the outsider she seems fit to be. It takes someone on the inside to illuminate the sinister underpinnings of the family, and that person is Junior’s wife, Morgan. Jacobs-Jenkins’s reimagining of the outsider trope is one of the major virtues of his script. Morgan is not beholden to the father’s contradictions, but she cannot afford to ignore them. Her loyalty to the family he’s created has landed her a prison sentence, but it has also given her a glimpse into what lies behind the facade of “black excellence”: a relentless commitment to maintaining their image. It is a joy to watch her stir up a storm on such a pristine set. And out of all the monologues this play manages to squeeze into its runtime, hers alone has the urgency and sincerity required to keep an audience gripped. But like much of the show, Morgan’s uprising comes across less like an indictment of the family’s flimsy commitment to emancipatory politics, and more like a cathartic revenge plot.
On the whole, Purpose is a well-crafted melodrama. It might skim past the tensions between being black and wealthy in America, but it is an undeniably entertaining bombshell of a production.