Is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins the best playwright in America?

Washington Post

3 days ago

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was anxiously amused about how he would be portrayed in this profile. Would I mention that twice when we met at the Hayes Theater, in the days after the playwright's hilarious and explosive dynastic drama 'Purpose' had won the Pulitzer Prize and six Tony Award nominations, he ordered the same quick bite while juggling a tight schedule? 'The idea that you're going to watch me eat Shake Shack twice is absolutely psychotic.'
Sitting in the green room upstairs, subdued after a whirlwind week that included his first time attending the Met Gala, he gave an eloquent answer about how he metabolizes contemporary culture to generate plays that feel thrillingly urgent.
'My obligation is to write to people living in reality with me in the present,' he said. 'Obviously, I'm very neurotic. I'm always trying to understand what's happening and why. My friends every day talk about what they're anxious about, and yet no one's asking for the theater to address that anxiety — but that's what it's supposed to do.' He added, 'I try to follow my own panic.'
Then, he quickly flipped the mirror back on himself. 'You're like: 'He was a sociopath! He just rattled on like a monster!'' He cocked his head back with a gravelly and breathless laugh that begins high in the back of his throat. And later, 'Are you going to, like, assassinate my character?'
Jacobs-Jenkins has long articulated an especially vivid self-awareness. In his breakthrough 'An Octoroon,' the narrator is a Black playwright named BJJ who paints himself in whiteface and tells the audience, 'I can't even wipe my a-- without someone trying to accuse me of deconstructing the race problem in America.'
Adapted from Dion Boucicault's 1859 melodrama, the show had an embattled premiere in 2010 but returned a few years later to become a sensation. It was produced and reprised for encore runs both off-Broadway and at Woolly Mammoth, where, among other area theaters, the native of Washington's Takoma neighborhood has enjoyed a fruitful artistic home. Jacobs-Jenkins would go on to become a two-time Pulitzer finalist, for 'Gloria' (2015), a shocking workplace comedy partly inspired by his stint assisting in the New Yorker's fiction department, and for 'Everybody' (2017), a remixed morality play about death in which the actors are assigned their roles by chance. In 2016, he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, commonly known as the genius grant.
Jacobs-Jenkins has been a leading voice among a cohort of Black playwrights, including fellow Pulitzer winners Jackie Sibblies Drury and Michael R. Jackson, whose daring and varied explorations of form and subjectivity have upended audience expectations and revolutionized storytelling onstage.
'There's still this instinct critically to say, 'Look at Black drama!'' Jacobs-Jenkins said of industry observers who have attempted to suggest that their work somehow captures that impossible misnomer — 'the Black experience.'
'It's like, no, this is your drama,' he said. 'You're surrounded by Black people, and it stresses you out.'
His recent work reflects an artist no longer preoccupied with what people think his work should or shouldn't say. He remains one of American theater's preeminent provocateurs, but his showmanship has grown subtler and more assured.
He won his first Tony last year, for best play revival, with 'Appropriate,' about White siblings who uncover an album of lynching photos while cleaning out their late father's plantation house. Originally produced in 2014 and revised for the playwright's Broadway debut, the show is, like much of his work, approachable and funny but searing in its incisiveness.
'Purpose,' which continues the playwright's career-long interest in family drama, is in some ways his most orthodox play to date. If it's awarded the Tony on Sunday, Jacobs-Jenkins will become the first Black playwright to win best play since August Wilson did for 'Fences' in 1987. And this summer, he's tackling an assignment that's become a rite of passage for mid-career dramatists, penning the book of a musical filled with hits by a pop legend — in this case, an adaptation of Prince's 'Purple Rain.'
'I turned 40, and everything insane has happened in the last four months of my life,' he said, referring to welcoming a second child, losing a parent and absorbing a new level of career success.
'I do feel weird, though, that my Black family drama is the one that everyone's like … you know what I mean?' he said, reflecting on the shower of accolades for 'Purpose' without completing the thought. 'There is a part of me that's self-conscious about that. But then I think about what I think I'm doing inside the play versus how it's received — I have to let that gulf exist, or I'll go crazy.'
The chasm between public perceptions and messy private lives is at the heart of 'Purpose,' a behind-the-headlines meditation on family, faith and the legacy of the civil rights movement. The play grew out of a commission Jacobs-Jenkins received from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre a decade ago, at the tail end of the second administration of President Barack Obama. He began by identifying the ensemble members he wanted to write for — Jon Michael Hill and Glenn Davis, both Tony-nominated for playing brothers in the show, and Alana Arenas, who plays the wife who becomes collateral damage to Davis's blundering scion.
The story, set in the posh home of a Chicago power couple (played by Harry Lennix and LaTanya Richardson Jackson, also Tony nominees), bears strong resemblance to the downfall of Jesse L. Jackson Jr., the former Illinois congressman who in 2013 admitted to misusing campaign funds. But the playwright's influences were both broader and more personal. 'I became obsessed with this idea of Black dynastic ambitions, and how they never seem to take root in this culture. The Jacksons were an interesting object lesson,' Jacobs-Jenkins said, though his research extended to other luminaries of the Black political class, including Obama, Colin Powell and John Lewis.
A photo of the tearstained face of Jackson's father, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, at Obama's first presidential victory stuck in the playwright's mind. 'It was about fulfillment, it was about jealousy, it was the end of something. I thought about that a lot.'
Men of Jackson's generation were also the same age as the playwright's father, who died this year. 'I was asking myself, were my parents traumatized by the civil rights movement, and how do they feel about what's happening right now? And what do you do with a child who maybe didn't turn out the way that you thought they would?'
In the years since he first received the commission, Jacobs-Jenkins became a father of two. (He and his husband, the performer Cheo Bourne, live in Brooklyn.) He tried his hand as a TV showrunner, with the 2022 FX on Hulu series 'Kindred,' based on Octavia Butler's sci-fi classic. He wrote a play distilling how it felt to emerge from the height of the pandemic and approach midlife as a millennial, 'The Comeuppance,' which premiered off-Broadway in 2023 and came to Woolly Mammoth in a gripping production this past fall.
A deadline attached to some prize money he received finally prompted Jacobs-Jenkins to write 'Purpose' in earnest, a process he undertook in a workshop with actors, including Davis. Soon after the workshop, in 2021, Davis was appointed co-artistic director of Steppenwolf with Audrey Francis, and they approached Jacobs-Jenkins about staging the as-yet-unfinished play as part of their inaugural season.
'Once he started delivering new pages, it felt like the words were coming out of our mouths as if we created them,' Davis told me at a recent cocktail party held in the playwright's honor down the block from the theater. 'He's so attuned to how actors speak,' Davis added. 'He closes his eyes in rehearsal; he listens more than he watches.'
Phylicia Rashad, who signed on to direct the Steppenwolf production that premiered last spring before transferring to Broadway, said in a phone interview: 'He creates real people. There's nothing contrived about any of them.' She likened the way Jacobs-Jenkins writes for actors to her experience working with Wilson on 'Gem of the Ocean.'
Sarah Paulson was lured back to Broadway after a 14-year absence by the script for 'Appropriate' and won a Tony for her portrayal of an acid-tongued matriarch ultimately consumed by her own animosities. 'It was like the paper was on fire. It was so incredibly clear to me who she was,' Paulson said in a phone interview.
Jacobs-Jenkins was actively revising the play, which he had written before he started a family of his own, throughout the rehearsal process. 'He was really open to seeing what it might look like if you tried the thing that occurred to you [as an actor], and that was really galvanizing,' Paulson said. (The two have stayed friends. When their Tony trophies were mixed up after engraving, they never bothered to switch them back.)
'Purpose' and 'Appropriate' are more familiar in form than much of his earlier work. ('Neighbors,' his 2010 New York debut, includes a family of Black minstrels named the Crows wearing blackface.) But Jacobs-Jenkins maintains a keen interest in toying with his audience, in ways that have grown slyer the broader those crowds have become.
'I had developed this obsession with trying to create an audience experience that felt related to what it is to be racialized, which is to go from feeling like a part of a group to very quickly feeling like an individual,' he said of writing 'Appropriate.' 'This experience of laughing with other people, and then you stop … and you're going, 'Why are you guys still laughing?''
Jacobs-Jenkins's own experience with race was shaped by growing up in D.C., where he attended an Afrocentric charter school through the fifth grade. (He gave that biographical detail to the houseguest played by Tony nominee Kara Young in 'Purpose'). 'It was a huge part of the formation of my brain,' Jacobs-Jenkins said. 'I never felt any inferiority.'
It was not until he attended St. John's College High School, where he became a drama kid, and then Princeton that he slowly wrapped his mind around the social politics of race. 'I found people's racial anxieties very compelling and confusing,' he recalled. 'So much of the insidiousness of it is how it's internalized.'
Marion Barry twice served as mayor during the playwright's coming of age, when he remembers D.C. being 'incredibly Black.' Woolly's outgoing artistic director, Maria Manuela Goyanes, told me she has been encouraging Jacobs-Jenkins to write a play about Barry. 'It always feels like this incredible homecoming when he does a play in D.C.,' Goyanes said.
His first theatrical experience, when he was 5 or 6 years old, was on a regular visit to his grandparents in small-town Arkansas. His grandmother took him to an outdoor passion play, where the ascension of Jesus was aided by an illusion that involved plastic garbage bags. ('I remember on the ride home being like, 'Wait, was that actually Jesus?' I didn't understand what theater was.')
He was raised by a single mom (his parents never married and separated when he was 7) and attended a variety of summer programs that turned out to be profoundly formative. It was at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop where a teacher noted he had promise in the theater, and at Wildwood Summer Theatre where he overlapped with other kids who later made their way into the business. And it was at the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop, which he attended every summer during high school and called 'a find-your-tribe moment,' where he fell in love with fiction.
He thought he would be a novelist but switched to playwriting while at Princeton, went on to earn a master's in performance studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and experimented with performance art before studying playwriting at Juilliard. He's also been a professor of playwriting and now teaches at Yale. ('He's a scholar without all of the moss and cobwebs,' Rashad said.)
A self-proclaimed 'Rent'-head who played the Ben Vereen part in his high school production of 'Pippin,' Jacobs-Jenkins is returning to his gateway passion for musical theater, writing the book for 'Purple Rain,' which will make its September premiere with a pre-Broadway tryout in Minneapolis.
'Prince would not want to reconstruct a museum piece,' he said of the project, which is in developmental workshops this summer. 'The open secret is that everyone has issues with the movie, including the people who made it,' he added. 'Very few people have done the work of trying to really ask, what did he change his mind about? What would he have revised?'
In the 1984 film, which catapulted Prince to superstardom, he plays a fictional version of himself. It memorably features scenes of domestic violence, and one that ends with a woman being tossed in a dumpster. Details about Prince's alleged abusive behavior toward women came to light this past fall, in reports about a documentary by Ezra Edelman that was scrapped by Netflix over opposition from Prince's estate.
The musical, which the playwright hinted will be updated from the film's 1980s setting, is being produced with the estate's involvement. 'I am thinking about how he dealt with femininity and women, and how he thought about them and honored them or didn't honor them as collaborators,' Jacobs-Jenkins said. 'That's definitely a big strain in the piece.'
The thorniness and magnetism of Prince as a subject seems like an ideal fit. 'He was constantly encouraging people to question the trappings of identity,' Jacobs-Jenkins said. 'He was interested in exposing a lot of fictions as fictions — fictions about identity, fictions of belonging. He was always trying to encourage people to make everything new.' Here it seemed the playwright had again flipped the mirror back on himself.
In addition to 'Purple Rain,' Jacobs-Jenkins will also write a screenplay for A24, based on a best-selling novel from this past summer. And he may soon be ready to give TV another try after what he called 'a very difficult experience' with 'Kindred.' (The series was canceled after one season.)
Surreal as it seems to have found a comfortable place, he is processing the home he has built in the theater. 'For so long, there's a part of you that's trying to justify why you're in the room,' an experience he said was heightened by being Black and breaking through at a young age. 'I was doing the thing that I really loved, and I was having to beg for permission to do it — from critics, from theaters, from collaborators,' he recalled. 'Then I did the work, and now look up and I'm relatively happy. No one's going to tell me I'm not a playwright.'