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Chicago Tribune
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
2025 Tony Awards: Steppenwolf Theatre's ‘Purpose' wins best play
NEW YORK — 'Purpose,' a drama by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins that was commissioned and first produced by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, has won the Tony Award for best play at the awards ceremony at Radio City Musical Hall. The play, with a stort loosely based on the family of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, was nominated alongside 'The Hills of California,' 'John Proctor Is the Villain' and 'Oh, Mary!' The win is a major victory for the famed Chicago company that last wowed New York theater with Tracy Letts' 'August: Osage County' in 2008. Actress Kara Young, who was added to the Chicago cast of 'Purpose' for the Broadway production, also won a Tony for best featured actress in a play. In accepting the award, Glenn Davis, Steppenwolf's co-artistic director and a cast member and Tony nominee himself, had the chance to remind New York and the television audience of Steppenwolf's accomplishments over the years. Playwright Jacobs-Jenkins thanked 'the city of Chicago for making this show what it was.' He also said Chicago had 'the best actors in America.' The 2025 Tony Awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and Broadway League in a ceremony Sunday at Radio City Music Hall in New York, hosted by 'Wicked' star Cynthia Erivo and broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.PHOTOS: Tony Awards 2025: Red Carpet Arrivals
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Tony Awards 2025 winners list with live updates
The 2025 Tony Awards winners will be announced soon, with Cynthia Erivo as host of a telecast in which so many major categories remain tossups. Three musicals — 'Maybe Happy Ending,' 'Buena Vista Social Club' and 'Death Becomes Her' — are tied with the most nominations, with 10 each. The best play frontrunners are an eclectic bunch too: Cole Escola's crowd-pleasing romp 'Oh, Mary!' Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Pulitzer Prize-winner 'Purpose' and Kimberly Belflower's 'John Proctor Is the Villain,' a reexamination of 'The Crucible.' Hollywood' invasion of Broadway is reflected in a starry list of acting nominees that includes George Clooney, Sadie Sink, Sarah Snook, Mia Farrow, Daniel Dae Kim, Darren Criss, Bob Odenkirk, Conrad Ricamora and Jonathan Groff. The performance that cut the deepest for Times theater critic Charles McNulty was six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald as Rose in George C. Wolfe's revival of 'Gypsy,' which he called 'a harrowing reexamination of the musical through the historical prism of race.' Here's how to watch the Tony Awards, but if you can't, check back here often. This list of winners will be updated in real time during the ceremony Sunday. 'Buena Vista Social Club''Dead Outlaw''Death Becomes Her''Maybe Happy Ending''Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical' 'English' by Sanaz Toossi'The Hills of California' by Jez Butterworth'John Proctor Is the Villain' by Kimberly Belflower'Oh, Mary!' by Cole Escola'Purpose' by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins 'Eureka Day''Romeo + Juliet''Thornton Wilder's Our Town''Yellow Face' 'Floyd Collins''Gypsy''Pirates! The Penzance Musical''Sunset Blvd.' George Clooney, 'Good Night, and Good Luck'Cole Escola, 'Oh, Mary!'Jon Michael Hill, 'Purpose'Daniel Dae Kim, 'Yellow Face'Harry Lennix, 'Purpose'Louis McCartney, 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow' Laura Donnelly, 'The Hills of California'Mia Farrow, 'The Roommate'LaTanya Richardson Jackson, 'Purpose'Sadie Sink, 'John Proctor Is the Villain'Sarah Snook, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' Darren Criss, 'Maybe Happy Ending'Andrew Durand, 'Dead Outlaw'Tom Francis, 'Sunset Blvd.'Jonathan Groff, 'Just in Time'James Monroe Iglehart, 'A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical'Jeremy Jordan, 'Floyd Collins' Megan Hilty, 'Death Becomes Her'Audra McDonald, 'Gypsy'Jasmine Amy Rogers, 'Boop! The Musical'Nicole Scherzinger, 'Sunset Blvd.'Jennifer Simard, 'Death Becomes Her' Natalie Venetia Belcon, 'Buena Vista Social Club'Julia Knitel, 'Dead Outlaw'Gracie Lawrence, 'Just in Time'Justina Machado, 'Real Women Have Curves: The Musical'Joy Woods, 'Gypsy' Brooks Ashmanskas, 'Smash'Jeb Brown, 'Dead Outlaw'Danny Burstein, 'Gypsy'Jak Malone, 'Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical'Taylor Trensch, 'Floyd Collins' Tala Ashe, 'English'Jessica Hecht, 'Eureka Day'Marjan Neshat, 'English'Fina Strazza, 'John Proctor Is the Villain'Kara Young, 'Purpose' Glenn Davis, 'Purpose'Gabriel Ebert, 'John Proctor Is the Villain'Francis Jue, 'Yellow Face'Bob Odenkirk, 'Glengarry Glen Ross'Conrad Ricamora, 'Oh, Mary!' Knud Adams, 'English'Sam Mendes, 'The Hills of California'Sam Pinkleton, 'Oh, Mary!'Danya Taymor, 'John Proctor Is the Villain'Kip Williams, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' Saheem Ali, 'Buena Vista Social Club'Michael Arden, 'Maybe Happy Ending'David Cromer, 'Dead Outlaw'Christopher Gattelli, 'Death Becomes Her'Jamie Lloyd, 'Sunset Blvd.' Joshua Bergasse, 'Smash'Camille A. Brown, 'Gypsy'Christopher Gattelli, 'Death Becomes Her'Jerry Mitchell, 'Boop! The Musical'Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, 'Buena Vista Social Club' 'Buena Vista Social Club,' Marco Ramirez'Dead Outlaw,' Itamar Moses'Death Becomes Her,' Marco Pennette'Maybe Happy Ending,' Will Aronson and Hue Park'Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical,' David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts 'Dead Outlaw' (music and lyrics. by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna)'Death Becomes Her' (music and lyrics. by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey)'Maybe Happy Ending' (music by Will Aronson, lyrics by Will Aronson and Hue Park)'Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical' (music and lyrics by David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts)'Real Women Have Curves: The Musical' (music and lyrics by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez) Andrew Resnick and Michael Thurber, 'Just in Time'Will Aronson, 'Maybe Happy Ending'Bruce Coughlin, 'Floyd Collins'Marco Paguia, 'Buena Vista Social Club'David Cullen and Andrew Lloyd Webber, 'Sunset Blvd.' Marsha Ginsberg, 'English'Rob Howell, 'The Hills of California'Marg Horwell and David Bergman, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'Miriam Buether and 59, 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow'Scott Pask, 'Good Night, and Good Luck' Rachel Hauck, 'Swept Away'Dane Laffrey and George Reeve, 'Maybe Happy Ending'Arnulfo Maldonado, 'Buena Vista Social Club'Derek McLane, 'Death Becomes Her'Derek McLane, 'Just in Time' Brenda Abbandandolo, 'Good Night, and Good Luck'Marg Horwell, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'Rob Howell, 'The Hills of California'Holly Pierson, 'Oh, Mary!'Brigitte Reiffenstuel, 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow' Dede Ayite, 'Buena Vista Social Club'Gregg Barnes, 'Boop! The Musical'Clint Ramos, 'Maybe Happy Ending'Paul Tazewell, 'Death Becomes Her'Catherine Zuber, 'Just in Time' Natasha Chivers, 'The Hills of California'Jon Clark, 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow'Heather Gilbert and David Bengali, 'Good Night, and Good Luck'Natasha Katz and Hannah Wasileski, 'John Proctor Is the Villain'Nick Schlieper, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' Jack Knowles, 'Sunset Blvd.'Tyler Micoleau, 'Buena Vista Social Club'Scott Zielinski and Ruey Horng Sun, 'Floyd Collins'Ben Stanton, 'Maybe Happy Ending'Justin Townsend, 'Death Becomes Her' Paul Arditti, 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow'Palmer Hefferan, 'John Proctor Is the Villain'Daniel Kluger, 'Good Night, and Good Luck'Nick Powell, 'The Hills of California'Clemence Williams, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' Jonathan Deans, 'Buena Vista Social Club'Adam Fisher, 'Sunset Blvd.'Peter Hylenski, ' Just in Time'Peter Hylenski, 'Maybe Happy Ending'Dan Moses Schreier, 'Floyd Collins'
Washington Post
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins the best playwright in America?
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.'
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Tonys: Sarah Paulson on the Truth-Teller Behind the Pulitzer-Winning Play ‘Purpose'
This past April, on a particularly balmy night, I walked down the aisle of the Helen Hayes theater, a storied old playhouse on 44th St. whose backstage I knew intimately but whose orchestra I wasn't fully acquainted with and took my seat. I held in my hand a Playbill with the title Purpose blazed across it and waited for the lights to go down. Turns out the experience of being inside a playwright's world when performing a play on stage and sitting in the dark watching a playwright's world come to life before you, can feel the same — if the playwright is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Beetlejuice' Returning to Broadway for Third Run Gotham TV Awards: 'Adolescence' Sweeps Limited Series Categories John Mulaney Explains Why He Declined Offer to Host 2024 Oscars Branden is a master of mood and the unspoken. He has the ability to set you on fire by placing you smack in the middle of a family dynamic that you seamlessly recognize and fear. Whether you like it or not, truths will be told — you might suffocate from laughter — and the earth beneath you will be scorched. But more remarkably, you will see yourself, your cousin, your mama, your daddy, your siblings, in all their messy human glory. Branden's writing will not apologize for showing you things about yourself that you would rather not discuss. He will, however, ask you to take it. Demand that you take it. It's not the job of the artist to ingratiate himself — the artist wants you to let it in, bear witness. To quote James Baldwin, 'The job of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover — if I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.' Branden is the embodiment of this notion. There are few things of which I am certain in this life. We don't deserve dogs. Oreo ice cream is superior to strawberry. And Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is the playwright of our time. I know this in my marrow. I spent the fall of 2023, and the better part of 2024, immersed in a universe he created, and it was one of the richest, most artistically fortifying experiences of my life. I began my acting career in theatre but had left it behind for the bright lights and possibilities of film and television. I found myself living in Los Angeles, after having spent the last 20-some years of my youth in New York City. I was offered a play here and there over the years, but nothing pulled me back east. The rigors of an eight-show week, constant vocal rest, living an essentially monastic life, all meant that for me to say 'yes' to something, it had to be a piece of writing that burrowed itself into my bones. Ten years had gone by, and nothing took up residence, so I stayed away. PING. Sept. 10th, 2021 I looked at my phone. An email from my agent. The subject line: 'Appropriate.' I scrolled down. 'A play to be directed by Lila Neugebauer and written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.' I felt a flutter in my belly. A play by a living writer and a director I had long admired… But. I live in LA. I have three dogs. I'm old, and I'm tired. 'Read it,' I thought. 'Just read it. Maybe it won't speak to you, maybe it won't be for you, maybe it will be the greatest thing you've ever read!' I don't want to sound hyperbolic here, but facts are facts: reading the play changed my life. I said, 'Yes' almost immediately, and after many fits and starts along the way, I at last found myself in New York to begin rehearsals in the late fall of 2023. That's two years later, folks. I refused to let this one go. The thought of another actress getting to say these words literally filled me with a red-hot rage I think can only be described as nuclear, and I probably should just leave it at that. I hadn't been in a rehearsal hall in a decade and hadn't done a play with a living playwright save for maybe twice in my career. Now, a living playwright can be both a blessing and a curse. When your author isn't present for you to pepper with questions about their original intentions, you can feel both free and compromised — free to make your own choices but compromised by your own thoughts of perhaps not executing what the playwright may have dreamt of. (Because let me tell you, if Tennessee Williams had been alive to see my interpretation of Laura Wingfield, I am certain he would have taken away my Equity card himself.) On our first day of rehearsal for Appropriate, I was sufficiently nervous. I had read the play, I believed it belonged in the canon of great American plays, and there was the writer of this masterwork sitting right across from me. But what came to be clear over the course of our rehearsal process was that, I — we, the company — had a partner in Branden. He spent as much time refining his own writing as he did helping us crack it. He was immersed with us. Branden was my lighthouse, guiding me to shore, discerning, relentless, tireless in his pursuit of truth. My time with him working — really working — on his play revealed something vital to our survival as a society. Sitting in a dark theater, with a room full of strangers, feels almost holy. The richness of shared experiences, for all of life's separateness, in that sacred place, brings a very potent togetherness. And everyone who goes to the theater does want something, is hoping for something. The artist is reaching, and the audience is reaching, we all want the same thing, and that is to feel seen. To be known. Sitting in that holiest of theaters, that balmy April evening, the same theater where I had the privilege of giving voice to Branden's words night after night, of being carried by their invincible wings, now I felt a current of joy that felt like a miracle, because there it was again! His fire, his inexorable brilliance. Purpose is the work of a fire-maker. When the smoke clears, you are down to ashes. Everything is known, and only what is indestructible remains. The truth. Sarah Paulson is an Emmy- and Tony-winning actress. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Seeing Double? 25 Pairs of Celebrities Who Look Nearly Identical From 'Lady in the Lake' to 'It Ends With Us': 29 New and Upcoming Book Adaptations in 2024 Meet the Superstars Who Glam Up Hollywood's A-List
New York Times
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on Winning a Pulitzer for ‘Purpose'
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was getting ready for his first Met Gala on Monday afternoon when he got the news: his latest play, 'Purpose,' which is now on Broadway, won this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama. The other finalists were Cole Escola's 'Oh, Mary!,' which is also running on Broadway, and 'The Ally,' by Itamar Moses, which had an Off Broadway run last year at the Public Theater. Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, has been a Pulitzer finalist twice before, for 'Gloria' in 2016 and for 'Everybody' in 2018, and last year he won a Tony Award for 'Appropriate.' In 2016 he also won a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He grew up in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Brooklyn. 'An Octoroon' and 'The Comeuppance' are among his other well-received works. 'Purpose,' directed by Phylicia Rashad, was first staged last year by Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, which had commissioned the play; Jacobs-Jenkins wrote it for the company's actors. The Broadway production opened in March, and has been nominated for six Tonys, including best play. 'Purpose' is currently on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan. The cast includes, from left: LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Jon Michael Hill, Kara Young and Alana Arenas. Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
