‘Purpose’ Review: Dinner With the Black Political Elite

You may have trouble catching your breath from laughing so hard during the first act of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sophomore Broadway outing, “Purpose,” which opened Monday at the Helen Hayes Theater. Deeply imagined and grave beneath its yucks, it unspools like a brilliant sitcom.

Then, also like a sitcom, it jumps the shark.

Ah well, mixed emotions go with the territory. If “Purpose” is primarily a merciless dissection of hypocrisy in an important religious-political Black American family — the Jesse Jackson dynasty comes to mind — it is also a grudging love letter to them in all their God-praising, backroom-dealing, self-promotional glory. The problem is that in the constant switchback of perspectives, the play, directed by Phylicia Rashad, grows too hectic and attenuated to maintain a line of conviction.

The same could be said of the family, the Jaspers. Chicago-based like the Jacksons — the play originated at the Steppenwolf Theater Company in that city — they, too, are headed by an oratorical pastor who, in his youth, worked closely with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Also familiar are several possible unauthorized offspring, hushed up but not quite silent. Jacobs-Jenkins cannot help noting that among that generation of Bible-quoting civil rights worthies are enough sins of the father to burden a host of sons.

Indeed, approaching 80 and withdrawn from the front lines, Solomon Jasper (Harry Lennix) now reserves most of his thunder for his family. His formidable wife, Claudine, a honeyed matriarch with a law degree, is tough enough to shape it to her own ends as needed. But on their disappointing sons falls the brunt of Solomon’s biblical disapproval.

The older son, named for his father, is the more obviously wayward. Raised to uphold Solomon’s political legacy, Junior (Glenn Davis) instead tarnished it when, as a state senator, he was convicted of embezzling campaign funds. These he spent, according to his embittered wife, Morgan, on “cashmere drawers and betting on racing pigeons.”