Purpose – 04 May 2025

If I had to characterize Purpose in a single word, I think I might say, “hypocritical”—but I’d mean it in a good way. Purpose focuses on family values, but exposes the cruelty within a family that prides itself on its commitment to family values. This tight knit family seems to contain no genuine love, and masks its pain with devotion to faith and memories of the civil rights movement. Purpose is narrated by Nazareth “Naz” Jasper (Jon Michael Hill), son of a civil rights preacher Solomon “Sonny” Jasper (Harry Lennix) who worked alongside every famous example of 1960’s Black excellence the audience can think of. The story is fiction, but the human capacity for cruelty and hypocrisy is very real, and also very striking (in once instance, literally).

The most daring element of the story is how the family’s feelings of liberation enable them to enslave those they don’t accept. Morgan Jasper (Alana Arenas), a member of the family through marriage to Solomon “Junior” Jasper (Glenn Davis), speaks of being used as a political prop to help Junior look like he had uplifted her from humble origins to appeal to potential voters in his various candidacies. Her connections to this family involved her in a scandal for which she is about to go to prison. Though she tries to warn accidental guest Aziza Houston (Kara Young), a queer woman using Naz as a sperm donor, Morgan is unable to prevent the next round of nondisclosure agreements and poisoned lives created by proximity to this toxic family.

Familial problems include toxic masculinity, denial of mental illness (and climate change), intolerance of queer identities, overemphasis on faith as the solution to problems, and an unwillingness to see each other as they truly are. Though the play portrays Junior and Naz as having suffered the most—Junior to the point of a suicide attempt—the mother, Claudine Jasper (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) has a great monologue toward the end where she expresses her frustrations of having to take care of her children, while Sonny is off making more with random women—so many random women that he has no idea how many direct descendants he might have.

Yet it’s not just the family that’s seriously messed up. In her exit speech, Aziza expresses that part of not wanting to use Naz as her sperm donor anymore has nothing to do with the mistreatment she’s witnessed, but actually centers around the fact that he might be neurodivergent. She does not want the difficult task of raising a child who might be on the spectrum—tough to believe from the only queer liberal person in the room, but another brilliant layer on the show’s theme of cruelty and hypocrisy. Naz is the most normal person in the family; amidst the chaos of the dinner scene’s accusations, the potential suicide attempt brilliantly mis-predicted as coming from Morgan, the actual suicide attempt, the warnings about NDAs, the crushing of everyone’s dreams, and the torturous rejections, Aziza is fixated on the idea that her future child might communicate awkwardly and isolate himself from people. Naz isn’t even diagnosed; it is absurd for Aziza to turn her back on someone after he yelled at her once, as though the occasional raised tone isn’t perfectly sensible when someone is under a lot of inescapable pressure. Thinking about it after the fact, I wonder if Aziza didn’t really believe these things, but knew that Naz was the one person in the room who wouldn’t hurt her for saying the negative things she needed to say to get out of the house, when she was sort of being held hostage. Maybe Naz was someone she was willing to sacrifice to get her own freedom. After all, it is also a play about liberation.

There are many nuanced philosophical points to unpack in Purpose, from the asexuality being somehow worse than homosexuality, to the very gendered family roles in a family where everyone is an exceptionally strong individual, to what constitutes disappointing a family, to what’s in a name, and it’s easy to think that the most important conversation in the play is the closing one in which Sonny and Naz talk about what gives life purpose. But really, that’s the dénouement. The pivotal conversation is the constant thread of the story, and it’s about choice. Everyone in this family knows what to expect from each other, yet they all choose to sit around a dinner table and debate. Before it deteriorates into personal attacks and violence, it’s a concept that’s slowly deteriorating from the world— choosing a complicated, hurtful experience because, at the end of the day, family has the most context for an attempt to understand a person, even if in some ways they have written that person off. Purpose is less about the purpose of life and more about the purpose of family; the purpose of family, as portrayed here, is the continuity of people who know you, judge you, but, at the end of the day, love you.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.