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How Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Solved Purpose’s ‘Intermission Problem’
“You have to be intentional about the blue balls you’re creating for the audience.”
He followed it with plays including An Octoroon, Everybody, and Gloria(partly based on his experience as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker), works that toyed with theatrical form and took on weighty subjects, particularly involving race, in bold ways. In many respects it’s an old-fashioned contraption: a memory play like The Glass Menagerie, with a narrator telling the story retrospectively; a family drama set in a house over a weekend, during which secrets are revealed and fireworks go off — a little like August: Osage County. “It’s a famous piece of writing in the muscular realism style,” said Jacobs-Jenkins, “and it’s just good technique: You’re stacking all the characters, and you want to get them to a place where they’re going to have to unload on each other.” Beyond Watchmen, his most prominent credit is Kindred, based on the Octavia Butler novel.
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