Lena Waithe and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on How Pulitzer Winner ‘Purpose' is in Dialogue With ‘A Raisin in the Sun'

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The Emmy-winning writer-actor Lena Waithe ('The Chi,' 'Master of None') recently sat down with the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to discuss his Pulitzer Prize-winning new play, 'Purpose,' now up for six Tony Awards including best play. Waithe was interested in talking through all the ways that Jacobs-Jenkins' drama about a Black family in Chicago can be seen as a work in conversation with Lorraine Hansberry's landmark 1959 play 'A Raisin in the Sun.' The duo bonded over their shared reverence for Hansberry and picked apart the themes and ideas in 'Raisin' that are refracted through a contemporary lens in 'Purpose.'
LENA WAITHE: The night of the Met Gala, I was home and watching the carpet and feeling such positivity, and I did something that I do every year: I revisited 'A Raisin in the Sun' — the film, but I also have the text of the play as well. The film really moves me in a lot of different ways. I had the honor of being at the opening night of 'Purpose,' and it was such a phenomenal evening. I couldn't help but feel the conversation that was happening between 'A Raisin in the Sun' and 'Purpose.'
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As a person who has studied Miss Hansberry, who has obsessed over Miss Hansberry, I think that oftentimes we, as younger-generation artists, are descendants of these writers. What was really fascinating to me was the fact that both these plays, 'Purpose' and 'A Raisin in the Sun,' take place in a home. We never leave the house. It's also a Black family inside of a house.
BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS: And they're both Chicago families.
LW: Exactly! What I also love about 'Purpose' is the conversations that are happening between these different generations that are having a difficult time understanding each other. And there's an idea, with Black families in particular, about how we're being perceived. What will our family name say about us?
Watching 'A Raisin in the Sun' again, I learned something new. I realized that the play is not just about a Black family being brave enough to move into a neighborhood and to integrate into white America. But rather, it's about Walter Lee becoming a man, and realizing that you can't put a price on dignity. You can't put a price on your family's worth. And in your play that's happening as well. The adult sons in this family are trying to understand who they're supposed to be.
I say all this to ask: What does it mean to you, Brandon, to be a man?
BJJ: That's just a daily question. It's one of the questions that's at stake in every generation. What are you choosing to inherit or not inherit? No one teaches you how to be anything but the people in your life.
My father passed away at the beginning of this year, right before we started rehearsals. He was actually the same age as the patriarch in my play, Solomon Jasper. That was not something that was intentional, but I could feel that I was, in a quiet way, trying to talk through things with him, through the play and with the play.
My father also had other kids. I have all these half-siblings in the world. When I talked to him about it, he said to me, 'You know, everybody I knew had an outside family or outside kids, and part of it was that none of us thought we were going to live past the age of 55.' He was witnessing these evolutions and social progress over the course of his life, and suddenly having to renegotiate his relationship to what he thought his future would look like. When you live like that you are making it up as you go. You don't have an idea of how to be an older man. I think about how blessed I am to have these models who've lived that long, who've survived a lot of political and social violence.
I don't even know how to answer that question of what being man means to me, because I feel like I'm still receiving new models in real time. There's just so much at stake and its feels like it's particularly tricky. Black masculine life is tricky.
LW: One of the things I was thinking about when I left 'Purpose' was the patriarch, and asking myself who taught him what it meant to be a man.
BJJ: This is the generation where Walter Sr., the patriarch in 'Raisin' who has passed on, could have lived, right? The implication is that in that time period, when 'Raisin' was written, that man worked himself to death. Worked himself to death to become this bag of money. And Solomon is the generation after that. He was given access to a different sort of agency and political movement. He could make a living for himself in a way that Walter couldn't.
Thinking about 'Raisin,' another thing I love about that play is the women and how those three female characters are a triangulation of three kinds of femininity in that era. In some ways I've also repeated that with 'Purpose.'
LW: In your play, Kara Young's character, Aziza, is very close to the daughter, Beneatha, in 'Raisin.' Yes, Aziza is queer… but Beneatha is definitely exploring some shit!
BJJ: There's a radicality to her. I hate when people do this to writers, but I think Lorraine sees herself in Beneatha, and in some ways Kara's character, her biography most closely hews to mine.
No one is shaped more by history than women, honestly, and at least if you look at every decade of the 20th century, there's a different kind of lady for each decade, and 'Raisin' is just so incredible at capturing this pivotal moment in the culture.
LW: One thing that really stood out to me when I was thinking about the three women in 'Purpose' is that Claudine, the matriarch, is very much in dialogue with 'A Raisin in the Sun' and with the matriarch in that play, Lena Younger. They are both there to uphold the husband — for Lena it's upholding her late husband's memory and inheritance. They are each responsible for their husband's legacy.
I'm thinking specifically of Black women here, but it could be said of women in general: It is a woman's job to uphold the male while he becomes himself, to help him become himself. And there is no one there to do the same for women. Something I think that's really stunning and beautiful about 'Purpose' is Aziza, a queer woman, is brought into the frame in a way that it's not in 'A Raisin in the Sun,' even though we know now that Lorraine Hansberry was a queer women. Her queerness was not able to be brought into the frame, not at that time.
BJJ: If you look at Lorraine's notebooks, she really struggled with that identity. She didn't have the tools to be free in that way.
LW: That's why I think 'Purpose' is bringing us into a new generation, bringing us into the future. When Kara's character walks into the door, it's almost you giving Lorraine's ghost, that part of her, permission to come onto the stage. Aziza, and I say this about myself too, we do not live under the male gaze. There's a freedom.
BJJ: What doesn't go directly questioned in 'Raisin' is Mama Younger's devotion. Her whole perception of herself, as an extension of loving this man, is to take care of this family. That was her whole purpose in life.
That's real. That's a real person in the world, and they have a whole philosophy that backs that up. And I was interested in putting that on stage. For me, the three women in 'Purpose,' they're all different iterations of, or riffs on, or responses to that idea of: Stand by your man.
There's Claudine, and then there's also Morgan, who is married to Claudine's son and going to jail for something he did. Morgan's whole thing is: Why did I stand by this man? Because now I'm literally going to jail and nobody's throwing me a party.
And then Aziza, who's going to have a baby on her own, she's like: I'm gonna do this by myself.
LW: I love that Aziza and Nazareth, the family's younger son, ride off together. They end up getting the same car to exit this house, which, in my opinion, is also a metaphor for a different time in our history and our culture.
I was also thinking about how it takes more than just men to uphold the patriarchy. Women often have a hand in it as well. One thing I picked up on is that you don't really see the grandchildren in 'Purpose.' In 'A Raisin in the Sun' we see Walter Lee's son and we know that he is the future of this family, and we see how Lena treats him and how she wants to take care of him and help raise him.
But in 'Purpose,' with the grandchildren, you're aware of them, but they're invisible. Morgan is keeping these kids away from the family. Even though we don't see them in this play, I am thinking about those sons.
BJJ: They're like little princes locked in a tower.
I'm always interested in gesturing towards the ways that families wind up shaping themselves inadvertently. Where do these branches start to break off? What creates the moments of renegotiating the lines of the family? A lot of the energy of this play is about these two mothers, Claudine and Morgan, who are very different, but who I also think of, honestly, as the same person who just happen to be born in the exact wrong times to be able to see each other.
But they're who makes the story of the family. They're deciding: Well, this can't be part of my kids' life. To me, that's the reality of how families are negotiated, now especially.
LW: I want to ask about secrets within the family. I think what resonated with me about your work is the fact that oftentimes Black families are really good at keeping secrets, and I'm curious about what that means to you, and how that clearly erodes everything in the home.
BJJ: I've said that this play is attached to my play 'Appropriate,' which was on Broadway last year. 'Appropriate' and 'Purpose' are both family secret plays.
For me, ultimately, it's about how shame is toxic. If there's one thing I want people to take back into their lives, it is this idea that shame is the worst thing you can encourage and introduce into your family. Because what really motivates that secret-keeping is individual shame. The best thing you could do for the generations rising up in your family is to be transparent, and think of family as the place where you can be your fullest self.
Black families and Black folks in general, our emotional range and our affect is so policed — in pop culture, privately, socially. And so you do have these families that are deep in fear of somehow being in reality with each other, because they think that's going to make them lesser-than, rather than celebrating the fact that everyone's present together, that love can happen in spite of these things.
That's the moral, guys. Shame should have no place in the family. Every psychologist will tell you that. Never shame your children. That's how you build monsters.
LW: One thing I've thought about since seeing the play, and it's haunted me a little bit, is about male sexuality, and particularly Black male sexuality. You've depicted that with the youngest son, Nazareth.
BJJ: There's so much more to conversations about sexuality and desire. We all live with desire, and it's so complicated, and yet our representation is always on a binary. I wish there was more nuanced wrestling with it. That's why I love Tennessee Williams. All that work was about: We don't even know what we're talking about when we talk about desire, yet it is the thing we all live with and wrestle with.
LW: My last question is about family and the idea of it. I've come to find that I'm not a believer in blood. The people that I'm closest to are not my blood relatives, and the people I feel the most distance from are actually related to me. You write so beautifully about different kinds of families, and how those family dynamics operate. And you are one of the patriarchs of your own family. So I wanted to ask you: What is your definition of family?
BJJ: For me, family is about relationships and people. It's about love and a commitment to love, in spite of everything. And I think it's about respect. Ultimately the reason families fall apart is that people lose that respect for each other. They stop seeing the humanity and they project their own traumas and psycho-battles onto each other.
Life is hard enough, and family gives you the unit to get through it. It's supposed to be a place of sanity. Ideally. Often it's not.
I'm gonna make a huge sweeping statement: I teach a lot, and I see kids showing up where I'm like: Oh, you don't have to find your family. There's culture-changing stuff where there are parents on TV now talking about how much they love their kids. That was not what I had growing up at all.
LW: Me, either. I mean, you saw the Thanksgiving episode.
BJJ: Families and found families are necessary, especially to get through social moments that are antagonistic to your being. Family is the people who show up and who keep showing up.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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