“I’m so tired” are the first words that playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins utters when he gets on the phone. There’s good reason for that: Almost one year after winning the Tony Award for best revival of a play for his searing white Southern family drama, Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins is getting ready for the Tony Awards 2025, where he’s nominated for best play for Purpose, which follows a politically prominent Black family in Chicago on one unforgettable evening. In a year stacked with buzzy plays like Cole Escola’s smash hit, Oh, Mary!, and the Sadie Sink–led John Proctor Is the Villain, Purpose has perhaps emerged as the leader of the pack, earning the Pulitzer Prize for drama and taking home best play at the Drama Desk Awards.
If Jacobs-Jenkins does emerge victorious, he’ll be the first Black playwright to win the Tony for best play since August Wilson took home the trophy in 1987 for Fences. The absurdity isn’t lost on Jacobs-Jenkins, especially when considering how many Black playwrights are thriving in American theater at the moment. “It’s like Tarell [Alvin McCraney], Aleshea [Harris], Dominique [Morisseau], Suzan-Lori [Parks],” he says, rattling off his Black playwright peers. “Lynn Nottage still hasn’t won a Tony.” While the Tonys may not have taken notice, other awards bodies have. “I think 8 of the last 10 Pulitzers are Black writers,” he adds. “That says a lot about where American drama is. Full stop.” (He’s close: It’s seven.)
In conversation with Vanity Fair, Jacobs-Jenkins says he’s feeling “crazy” heading into his second Tony ceremony as a nominated playwright. “I didn’t really understand how triggered I would be by doing it right back-to-back,” he says. “It’s been really fun and in some ways really relaxing, but it’s a lot of energy and a lot of expectation.”
Oh, and there’s another reason Jacobs-Jenkins is more than a little exhausted. “I also have a three-month-old child at home,” he says nonchalantly. “You wake up twice in the middle of the night to feed, and it’s just crazy. It’s just too much.”
Luckily, adding a new member to his family—he and his husband, actor and cabaret artist Cheo Bourne, also have a four-year-old daughter, Indigo, at home in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn—has helped keep the roller coaster of his last year in perspective. “She’s a brand-new person. It’s wild,” he says. “She don’t care. She don’t know what any of this is. But hopefully one day she’ll be like, ‘I’m so glad this was happening while I was learning how to poop or whatever.’” While juggling a newborn baby and a newborn play can be tough, Jacobs-Jenkins is filled with gratitude. “I’m happy,” he says. “I’m overwhelmed and grateful and all those positive things too.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Vanity Fair: Last year you won best revival of a play for Appropriate, which you had written 10 years prior. How does this year compare to last year?
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: The stakes were lower. Last year our show opened a little earlier. Once the nominations came out, I was like, Oh, okay. I had little time. I’d gone on a little vacation. This year we opened a little bit later. I feel like we had no time to really recover. Suddenly, we were being invited to all these lovely things.
Last year it was decided that we were a revival, and that race was just a different race. It was a smaller category. The other lovely people were dead [laughs]. If you’d asked me a year ago if Purpose was going to be on Broadway, I would’ve been like, “No, of course not.” So I’m as shocked as anybody. The way the audiences are responding has been really special. The company itself feels like a little family. So it’s just been a very sweet, fun, happy little ragtag group of people. And that’s been really special too.
Purpose started at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Can you talk to me a bit about the development process?
There really aren’t that many storied acting ensembles left in the world. It’s one of our only ones. They contacted me almost 10 years ago now and said, “We want to talk about you.” I thought they were talking about doing one of my plays, like Appropriate or something.
It was an offer for this commission, and they were very specific. That era was still feeling its oats with the Tracy Letts of it all, the Bruce Norris of it all. They’re like, “The only requirement is that you have to write for our members of our ensemble, and our house style is muscular realism.” That’s the phrase they used. I don’t think they really say that anymore. I was like, “Okay, I love a challenge.” I remember going on their website and scrolling through their ensemble and zeroing in on three people who are actually still in the show: Glenn Davis, Alana Arenas, and Jon Michael Hill, who at that time were young upstarts in the company. Ten years later, Glenn is literally the artistic director. That was the very beginning, the seeds of it.
All I knew was I wanted to write a family drama with them, and then they were going to play siblings. As the idea evolved, I liked the idea of Alana as a sister-in-law more, married to Glenn. That’s how it started. Honestly, it was pure playing around that got us to where we got to. It really grew quite organically out of that collaboration. I wish I could pretend I had a whole play and idea when I sat down to write this, but the story really did find itself. And honestly—no one talks about this—but 95% of plays, that’s how it really works.
As a writer, that’s nice to hear, because you think of divine inspiration striking someone and it all comes out in a day, and that’s actually not how it works.
I think it’s called play for a reason. I think it really does resemble play on a playground with your friends. It’s my job to design the game. But everybody’s got their own special powers and their own interests in what they want to play, and I was interested in giving them things that would challenge them. I didn’t want anyone to play something they played before.
Purpose is loosely based on the family of civil rights icon Jesse Jackson, and explores the idea of a legacy and the weight of carrying that legacy in a Black family. It’s clearly a lot of pressure. Not everyone can be Jesse Jackson.
Nor should everyone need to be. Can you imagine the stress it would be if we all had to be Jesse Jackson? [Laughs] I grew up adjacent to this in DC. There were tons of these folks in my life, and it was a lot of work. In some ways people thought of it as battle. They were going to war. War has costs ultimately, and a lot of those costs are borne by the family.
You’re a prolific playwright who’s written a bunch of more avant-garde work like An Octoroon, The Comeuppance, and Gloria. Your first two Broadway plays, Appropriate and Purpose, are more traditional, big family, kitchen-sink dramas. What is it like for you to find major success in this specific theater niche?
It’s so funny, right? Purpose was definitely conceived in relationship to my experience with Appropriate. When I got the commission, it was soon after Appropriate’s initial wave of premieres. I wrote a lot of this while in rehearsals for Appropriate last year.
I thought a lot about it. I find that the family drama—as weird and contrived and artificial, in some ways, as melodrama or a thriller—for whatever reason, it really touches people more broadly because we all have families. The story we tell ourselves as a member of a family is the oldest story we have of ourselves ultimately. Our earliest memories are of being someone’s child, and maybe someone’s brother and sister, before we discovered what we wanted to do in the world
I honestly think I can write family dramas till I die. I really do. I love people talking about their families. I love talking about my family. America’s favorite pastime is gossiping about families and analyzing people based on their families.
How do you navigate switching between more avant-garde work and more traditional work?
It has been really interesting. My two experiences of Broadway have been these exact forms. I would say the majority of folks, up until maybe recently, would’ve known me for my play An Octoroon, which is maybe one of the most wild and out-there of my plays. Yeah. I don’t feel like a different Branden when I sit down and write these things. They all require the same kind of work. I guess they just hit differently or whatever.
I live inside the experience of writing them. For me, they’re all connected in strange, underground ways. But as flowers, they manifest different for people. [Laughs] They’re all, to me, tied to a deep interest in history. What is Americanness, and how is human psychology, and therefore human relationships, shaped by historical forces? Those are always the themes. They just come out looking different.
Do people assume that there’s more of you in Purpose, because it’s about a Black family, than Appropriate, which is about a white family?
Literally, last night someone was like, “So are you Naz?” And I’m like, “No, I’m not an asexual nature photographer in a political family.” [Laughs] It’s insane. The truth is, most storytellers would say that you’re in every single character on some level. That character is just observations you made in your life. If there’s a character [in Purpose] my biography cues closest to, it’s probably the character of Aziza, which Kara Young plays. But again, I’m not a queer woman having a baby on my own, you know what I mean? It’s just such a funny thing.
The plays I’ve written up until now have been very intentionally not biographical in a way that I think has made people crave something like that for me…. I feel people projecting that need onto this, which is fine. Whatever gets people in seats and connected.
[Purpose] is a world I think I probably know more intimately, just having grown up where I grew up, when I grew up. No one asks me who I am in Appropriate. My friends know.
Do you still go and watch Purpose? Do you lurk in the theater?
Here’s the dirty secret: I went on paternity leave the minute we opened. I actually have not seen the show since the opening night. I’m going back for the first time on Friday. I think I’m also a little bit suspicious. I don’t like to be in the room when people are in the room who matter. The Tony voters begin to come, and I don’t want to be in the room. I feel like people are watching me, even if they’re not. Back when I was an emerging writer, no one cared about me. To some extent, people still don’t care about me. But sometimes now people want to come up and talk to me and tell me their thoughts, and I’m just not there for it.
Do you read reviews?
Well, I have a rule. I read them six months after it’s closed, just to not get hurt. But honestly, the truth is, you know what the reviews are because your friends treat you differently. [Laughs] You just know. It is so embarrassing too. If you have really rave reviews, everyone’s texting you the next day. If you don’t, your closest friends are calling you, being like…“How are you?” [Laughs]
Have you seen the other shows? I feel like this is a really strong year for theater, specifically new plays.
Oh yeah. Last year was also a strong year for plays. What’s cool about this year’s plays is that everything is so different. If you think about Oh, Mary! versus this versus John Proctor versus English, things could not be more different.
Last year they were saying, “It’s a good time for plays,” and I think that’s true. Plays are having a comeback. I don’t know why. Maybe because they’re cheaper to do and producers don’t want to spend money. I don’t know. But no skin off my back. I really think that in my cohort, at least, there’s been just an incredible bumper crop of writers for the theater, definitely compared to folks maybe a generation ahead of us. So I feel like everyone’s coming of age, and next year a lot of my friends are going to be transferring, some of them for the first time, to Broadway. I feel very lucky to be making theater in this moment.
A Black playwright hasn’t won best play at the Tony Awards since August Wilson won in 1987. What are your thoughts about that?
Somebody just pointed that out to me, and I’m like, That can’t possibly be true. That can’t possibly be true, but I guess it is true. I was three years old. I have a four-year-old. I just find that to be truly insane. There’ve been a lot of great folks nominated. The truth is, the last two women to win this prize were both named Yasmina Reza. There’s questions to ask. It’s an honor to be nominated, and the real reward is the audience.
Tony Sunday is approaching. How are you feeling about it?
No one really writes plays, I don’t think, to win Tony Awards. But it’s a nice thing that happens. There’s just nerves. It means so much to people. Really, really, really, for me, it’s about the actors who I think did an incredible amount of work. I’m really thinking about them going into Sunday, and, I don’t know, my first Tony Awards I accidentally watched when I was 13 years old.
It was the one where Elaine Stritch won, and I remember her getting cut off by the camera in this vicious way. I remember thinking, Oh, that’s the center of the universe up there. It’s so weird to be sitting in that audience now and wondering who is accidentally watching this in some sad bedroom in DC. It was the beginning of me being like, I need to move to New York. And here I am, having made this life here, and I’m just so grateful.
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The post It’s Been 38 Years Since a Black Playwright Won Best Play at the Tonys. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Could Change That. appeared first on Vanity Fair.
