Why Pulitzer Winner ‘Purpose’ Had Its Tony-Nominated Cast ‘Sh—ing Bricks’

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ family drama “Purpose” is already one of the big winners of the Broadway awards season: The play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in the same week, and it’s also up for the Tony Award for best play with five of the six performers in its cast nominated for acting awards.

Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:

But for a while there, it was a real nail-biter as to whether there would even be a completed play for its cast to perform. Three of the show’s Tony-nominated actors — LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Glenn Davis and Jon Michael Hill — share the backstory on the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast.

“It’s gone into Steppenwolf lore now,” says Davis, who is also the co-artistic director of the Steppenwolf Theater, the Chicago institution where “Purpose” premiered. Jacobs-Jenkins didn’t turn in a completed draft of the play until the night before the first preview. “I don’t know if we can curse on here, but we were all shitting bricks!” Davis cracks.

He continues, “But I’ll never forget this moment: We were waiting for the play, waiting, waiting, and we’re all on stage during our final day of tech. We’re starting previews the next day, and Branden delivers the play. We all read it onstage, and everyone starts crying. And I didn’t know if everyone started crying because the end of the play was so beautiful, or because we finally got the play that we can do the next night for audiences!”

“How about both?” chimes in Richardson Jackson.

On Broadway, Davis and Hill are reprising roles they originated in Chicago, playing siblings in a prominent Black family at a time of generational transition and high tension. Richardson Jackson, who joined the show for its Broadway run (along with Tony winner Kara Young, also new to the cast), stars at the family’s formidable matriarch.

Even on Broadway, rewrites came fast and furious. Hill, whose character acts as the story’s narrator, recalls what it was like learning new material on the fly: “You get out there in front of people and you’re doing these monologues, and you’re running, you’re running, and then you’re like: ‘Oh, there’s something new coming up. Am I going to remember what it is in the moment?’ That is one of the more exhilarating and terrifying experiences I’ve had on the stage.”

For her part, Richardson Jackson — who directed the 2022 Broadway revival of “The Piano Lesson” —was not looking for an acting job. “I absolutely was not,” she says. “I told myself if I was going to really concentrate on directing, I had to stop being seduced by acting. And stop bugging all of my director friends by trying to tell them what to do when they were directing a play!”

But when she read the complete draft of “Purpose,” she quickly changed her mind.

“I said: I got to get up and get over to that play in New York!” she remembers. “Because if there’s any way for me to do this—if they are bold enough to do this play—I want to be a part of it.”

The Broadway production is set to run through July 6, but Richardson Jackson thinks she might not be done with “Purpose” quite yet. “I’m looking to take this play to London,” she reveals, adding with a laugh: “You got that, Glenn?”

To hear the entire conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.