If you’re lucky, you have something in your life that gives you purpose, and you have people in your life to talk to about it. Purpose gives me focus; it helps me not get distracted by the hour-to-hour tumult and chaos of the world, and it gives me gratitude for what I’m doing and what I have in my life. When I feel that gratitude slipping from me — when I feel restless, irritable or frustrated — it’s usually because my sense of purpose is slipping for some reason, too.
I’ve been thinking about this because, after Times Opinion’s coverage last week of President Trump’s first 100 days in office, I heard from readers and podcast listeners grappling with this moment and ways to live through it and remain intact. And I thought about the inspiration I drew this year from a favorite source of mine: plays and musicals on Broadway that dealt with purpose in different ways.
These shows delve into dismay and disappointment in the world and their characters’ determination to make things better or happier. They are misfits and outsiders trying to break free of their private frustrations: the high school student Shelby in the play “John Proctor Is the Villain,” who wants to transcend men who have used or abused her; the helper robot Oliver in “Maybe Happy Ending,” who wants to reconnect with his old owner; the school board member Suzanne in “Eureka Day,” who wants the community to flourish as long her values dominate; and Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!,” who just wants a moment back in the spotlight. These characters stayed with me because they were driven by clear intention and a hunger for life and vitality; their performers — Sadie Sink, Darren Criss, Jessica Hecht and Cole Escola — were knockouts in my book because they understood and ultimately delivered on that sense of purpose. All four, along with their shows, were nominated for Tony Awards on Thursday.
But my favorite Broadway show of the season, just narrowly ahead of “John Proctor,” was the aptly named “Purpose,” by the great playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. At the risk of being too on the nose, if you want to think about purpose, see “Purpose,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama on Monday. In the tradition of the plays “August: Osage County,” “The Piano Lesson” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the play concerns a few days in the life of a sprawling American family that’s awash in a reckoning over betrayal, mendacity, inheritance (literal and figurative) and what people are called to do. There is a lovely scene toward the end of “Purpose” — no real spoilers — where the patriarch of the family, a character who calls to mind Jesse Jackson, talks about tending to the civil rights movement long ago and tending to bees now, late in his life.
“Honey never, ever spoils — did you know that?” Solomon Jasper says to his younger son, Naz. “And bees just … make that. And to think that I could, in some small way, participate in the miracle of honey, a sweetness everlasting. It gave me … purpose. Yes. A small sense of purpose. Which was always something I needed. Because without it, there is just despair. There is just emptiness. You’ve heard me say it a thousand times, but the movement was … there was such an extraordinary sense of God’s presence then — everywhere you looked. Purpose. And we felt as organized as a hive. Everybody knew their role, knew their potential, that common goal and how to achieve it — and we were all walking through the world just glowing with God. And when that world began to change … there was nothing like it, no feeling like it. The vision of the better place we all carried with us — it was coming true.”
More than anything, “Purpose” challenges you to think about the life course that we find ourselves on, or that we chose, and whether it’s right for us and whether it’s enough. What happens when we lose our sense of purpose so much that we are no longer intact — as humans, as a family, as America? It’s a play that meets our national moment.
