CHARACTER STUDIES

“Purpose” on Broadway and “Vanya” downtown.

- BY HELEN SHAW

In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's new play, a son considers his father's legacy.

Last season, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins had a Broadway hit at Second Stage’s Hayes Theatre with his Tony Award-winning “Appropriate,” a knock-down, drag-out comedy in which a quarrelsome white Arkansas family reunites for one last night on their decaying plantation estate. The set—a dimly lit, dilapidated mansion—represented both the family’s material connection to its slave-owning past and an American House of Usher, a place of palpable rot, subsiding slowly into the humid landscape.

Now Jacobs-Jenkins is back at the Hayes with “Purpose,” another thrilling battle royale in which, once again, a fractious family clashes over the course of a long night in a stately home. This interior, though, designed by Todd Rosenthal for the director Phylicia Rashad, is warm and welcoming and bright, an orange-walled great room backed by a curved staircase. Artifacts of Black heritage are everywhere. On the first floor, there’s a shrine to Martin Luther King, Jr.—a portrait with a Bible open beneath it—and, up in a second-floor gallery, we see vintage pictures of the family patriarch, standing by King’s side.

The family’s younger son, Naz (Jon Michael Hill), is a garrulous and wry narrator: he spends much of the play explaining backstory or, less usefully, hinting at what’s to come. “My father, the Honorable Reverend Solomon Jasper,” he says, gesturing to the portrait at the head of the stairs. “Some of you may be familiar with him, some of you not so much—and that’s fine.” He adds, dryly, “I guess it depends on how much you care about the American Civil Rights Movement.” (Hill, whose charismatic performance buoys pages of torrential monologue, often implicates the audience, to excellent comedic effect.)