By Tihut Tamrat, Contributing Writer
In Purpose, accountability does not enter the Jasper home quietly. It is already there, sitting in the room before anyone names it. It lives in the family photographs, in the polished furniture, in the rehearsed prayers, and most of all in the names each character carries. The play builds itself around the Jasper family, a Black political dynasty whose home appears, at first, to be a place of celebration, tradition, and achievement. A jaw dropping must-see, written by Tony award winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and directed by Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, the play is not only about a Black political family reckoning with scandal; it is about the terrible weight of being named for greatness and then expected to live without breaking beneath it.
At the center is Nazareth Jasper, a nature photographer whose quietness makes him feel almost misplaced among the louder ambitions of his family. He is a creative eye in a household trained to value political visibility, religious authority, and public service. To his father, Reverend Solomon Jasper, Nazareth is a disappointment: the son who dropped out of divinity school, the one who chose solitude over leadership. Yet Nazareth’s distance becomes his power. He sees what the others have trained themselves not to see.
Solomon, the family patriarch, carries the grandeur of the civil rights generation. He and his wife came out of a movement built on sacrifice and moral clarity. But the play carefully exposes the danger of confusing historical righteousness with personal innocence. Solomon speaks in the language of duty, but his household is full of people wounded by what he refuses to admit. His beekeeping becomes one of the play’s most striking metaphors.
Claudine Jasper, the matriarch, is generosity sharpened into control. She has hosted diplomats, protected reputations, and held the family together with elegance and force. She believes in the miracle of family, in the beauty of gathering, in the obligation to “come together as a family.” Her love protects, but it also manages, edits, and conceals. In her, the play shows how Black women are often forced into impossible roles: caretaker, strategist, shield, and sacrifice. Yet it also refuses to let care become a hiding place from accountability.
Junior, the brother and state senator, is perhaps the family’s clearest collapse between public image and private ruin. His history of wire fraud and embezzlement, his imprisonment, his bipolar disorder, his drinking, and his troubled marriage all reveal a man crushed under expectation. He is called cowardly, protected, blamed, and used. Politics becomes another form of denial harnessed to cover up wrongdoing.
Cornell Womack and Matthew Elijah Webb in La Jolla Playhouse’s production of PURPOSE; photo by Rich Soublet II. 
(L-R) Stephanie Berry, Andréa Agosto, Cornell Womack and Matthew Elijah Webb in La Jolla Playhouse’s production of PURPOSE; photo by Rich Soublet II. 
(L-R) Matthew Elijah Webb, Stephanie Berry, Sean Boyce Johnson, Crystal Dickinson and Andréa Agosto in La Jolla Playhouse’s production of PURPOSE; photo by Rich Soublet II.
Morgan, Junior’s wife, “refuses to remain furniture in the Jasper house”. Her anger is volatile, but it is also lucid. She understands that she has been chosen, shaped, and displayed according to the family’s needs: “brown but not too brown, pretty but not too pretty.” Her threat to expose the family through letters and recordings is dangerous, but it also exposes a deeper danger: the family’s dependence on secrecy. Morgan forces the Jaspers to confront the cost of treating people as accessories to power.
Aziza offers another kind of accountability. As Nazareth’s queer friend, and the woman he agrees to help through sperm donation, she opens a path outside the Jasper family’s rigid traditions. Their friendship becomes sacred. Through her, the play asks whether family can be chosen with more honesty than family inherited.
The title Purpose becomes heavier as the play unfolds. At first, purpose sounds noble: service, faith, family, legacy. But Jacobs-Jenkins reveals that purpose can also be used as pressure. It can justify silence, hide harm, and turn people into instruments of a larger story. From lies, deceit, and corruption to the unraveling of family drama, the play asks whether purpose is something we inherit, something we perform, or something we must have the courage to choose.
Purpose is sharp, funny, painful, and deeply alive. It understands that names can bless us, but they can also bind us. In the Jasper home, accountability begins when the characters stop hiding behind what their names are supposed to mean and confront what their lives have actually become.
Purpose leaves us with the question: if every path might be one of purpose, who are we responsible for becoming along the way?
Purpose, the Pulitzer prize and Tony- Award winning play, runs until June 7 in La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre. For tickets and information, please visit lajollaplayhouse.org.
