Inside Man

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's newest play on Broadway, Purpose, is another funny, heady, irreverent excavation into the psyche of an American family. Marley Marius meets its creator and cast.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is visibly dismayed. Within seconds of arriving at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space on West 52nd Street, he pronounces the quiet, clean, but definitely small ground-level dressing room where we'll be speaking crammed with a large metal rack, a space heater, and what feels like a few too many chairs-"so deadly."

"This isn't even, like, giving theater!" he cries, flipping on the mirror lights.

Far be it from me to disagree with him: Now 40, playwright Jacobs-Jenkins-whose funny and startling family drama Appropriate, starring Sarah Paulson and Corey Stoll, ran for seven months on Broadway last season, winning three Tonys along the way-has become a marquee name on the American stage. And on the bright but windy day when we fold ourselves into that dressing room, there are just three weeks to go before Purpose, his second show on Broadway, begins previews. (What will surely be his third, an adaptation of Purple Rain directed by Lileana BlainCruz, his old friend from Princeton, will be staged in Minneapolis in October.) A commission from the Steppenwolf Theatre Company nearly a decade in the making, Purpose arrives in New York with four actors from its world premiere in Chicago last year-Harry Lennix, Glenn Davis, Jon Michael Hill, and Alana Arenas-as well as its director, Phylicia Rashad. New to the production, due to open at the Helen Hayes Theater on March 17, are Kara Young (Cost of Living, Purlie Victorious) and LaTanya Richardson Jackson (A Raisin in the Sun, To Kill a Mockingbird).