Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is visibly dismayed. Within seconds of arriving at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space on West 52nd Street, he pronounces the quiet, clean, but definitely small ground-level dressing room where we’ll be speaking—crammed with a large metal rack, a space heater, and what feels like a few too many chairs—“ so deadly.”

“This isn’t even, like, giving theater!” he cries, flipping on the mirror lights.

Far be it from me to disagree with him: Now 40, playwright Jacobs-Jenkins—whose funny and startling family drama Appropriate, starring Sarah Paulson and Corey Stoll, ran for seven months on Broadway last season, winning three Tonys along the way—has become a marquee name on the American stage. And on the bright but windy day when we fold ourselves into that dressing room, there are just three weeks to go before Purpose, his second show on Broadway, begins previews. (What will surely be his third, an adaptation of Purple Rain directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, his old friend from Princeton, will be staged in Minneapolis in October.) A commission from the Steppenwolf Theatre Company nearly a decade in the making, Purpose arrives in New York with four actors from its world premiere in Chicago last year—Harry Lennix, Glenn Davis, Jon Michael Hill, and Alana Arenas—as well as its director, Phylicia Rashad. New to the production, due to open at the Helen Hayes Theater on March 17, are Kara Young ( Cost of Living, Purlie Victorious ) and LaTanya Richardson Jackson ( A Raisin in the Sun , To Kill a Mockingbird ).

Purpose centers on the Jaspers: Solomon “Sonny” Jasper (Lennix), a civil rights hero and staunch man of God who, in his later years, has taken up beekeeping; his indomitable wife, Claudine (Jackson); their elder son, Junior (Davis), a former state senator recently imprisoned (and released a little early) for embezzlement; his wife, Morgan (Arenas), who will soon be heading into prison for abetting Junior’s crimes; divinity-school dropout Nazareth, or “Naz” (Hill), the Jaspers’ arty younger son and the play’s narrator; and his friend Aziza (Young), who ends up stranded at the Jasper family’s home in Chicago during a snowstorm.

It’s no coincidence that Purpose and Appropriate —which first ran in New York in 2014, at the Pershing Square Signature Center, before wending its way to Broadway in 2023—share the same basic materials: the reunion of siblings after time apart, the revelation of family secrets, an eccentric female outsider observing it all. Jacobs-Jenkins had already written Appropriate when Steppenwolf, then under the artistic direction of Martha Lavey, came calling, and he soon began to wonder what “another version” of that story might look like.