Branden Jacobs-Jenkins wins Tony Award for Best Play
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a playwright and a professor in the practice of theater and performance studies in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), has been recognized with yet another distinguished honor for his work, this time with a Tony Award for Best Play.
The Tony, announced at the awards ceremony at Radio City Music Hall on June 8, is for Jacobs-Jenkins’ play “Purpose,” which made its Broadway premier at the Helen Hayes Theater in March. The honor comes just weeks after Jacobs-Jenkins was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the same play.
Jacobs-Jenkins is the first Black playwright to be honored with the Best Play award since August Wilson was recognized for his play “Fences” in 1987. (That play premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre before opening on Broadway.) In addition, it also makes Jacobs-Jenkins the first Black playwright ever to win back-to-back Tony Awards — last year he claimed his first Tony for his play “Appropriate,” which won for Best Revival of a Play.
The production also garnered a second Tony, this one to Kara Young, who plays Aziza Houston, for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play. That makes her the first Black actor to win that award for two consecutive years — last year she won it for her role as Lutiebelle in “Purlie Victorious.”
“Purpose” explores the complex dynamics involving a prominent Black family in Chicago when the youngest son returns home with an uninvited guest, the role played by Young. The production, directed by Tony Award-winning actor Phylicia Rashad, runs through the end of August.
Daphne Brooks, a scholar of African American studies at Yale, recalled how Jacobs-Jenkins stood out as “an intellectual force” back when he was a student in her survey course on African American theater while she was teaching at Princeton University. His emergence “as one of the most daring and rigorously insightful playwrights in the 21st century” makes perfect sense, she said.
“We’ve been waiting for a playmaker like him: someone who is committed to dissecting both Blackness as well as whiteness in rich, complex and boldly imaginative ways, and, quite crucially, with equal amounts of humor and gravity,” said Brooks, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music in FAS. “And in this regard, it’s important to note that he builds on the brilliance of playwrights such as Suzan-Lori Parks and Lynn Nottage.”
In “Purpose,” Brooks said, Jacobs-Jenkins offers audiences nuanced character studies, while at the same time “exploring each individual’s place in the universe, how we wrestle with and resolve our personal hopes and dreams and disappointments in life while managing the collective hopes and dreams of a people.”
The play premiered at the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago in 2024. In his acceptance speech, Jacobs-Jenkins, who is also a commissioned artist at Yale Rep, thanked the people of Chicago, “who literally made this show what it was with their enthusiasm,” and called for people everywhere to support their local theater companies.
“A lot of great stuff happens in New York, but a lot more happens out in the regions, so use your next commercial break to Google ‘a local theater near me,’” he said.
Jacobs-Jenkins joined the Yale faculty in 2021. Prior to that, Yale Rep produced the world premieres of two of his plays: “War” (2014) and “Girls” (2019).
His plays “Everybody” (Signature Theater) and “Gloria” (Vineyard Theater) were both Pulitzer finalists. In 2016, he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship.
According to a recent profile in The Washington Post, Jacobs-Jenkins is currently working on a musical adaptation of the 1984 Prince movie “Purple Rain.”
