This past April, on a particularly balmy night, I walked down the aisle of the Helen Hayes theater, a storied old playhouse on 44th St. whose backstage I knew intimately but whose orchestra I wasn’t fully acquainted with and took my seat. I held in my hand a Playbill with the title Purpose blazed across it and waited for the lights to go down.
Turns out the experience of being inside a playwright’s world when performing a play on stage and sitting in the dark watching a playwright’s world come to life before you, can feel the same — if the playwright is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.
Branden is a master of mood and the unspoken. He has the ability to set you on fire by placing you smack in the middle of a family dynamic that you seamlessly recognize and fear. Whether you like it or not, truths will be told — you might suffocate from laughter — and the earth beneath you will be scorched.
But more remarkably, you will see yourself, your cousin, your mama, your daddy, your siblings, in all their messy human glory. Branden’s writing will not apologize for showing you things about yourself that you would rather not discuss. He will, however, ask you to take it. Demand that you take it. It’s not the job of the artist to ingratiate himself — the artist wants you to let it in, bear witness.
To quote James Baldwin, “The job of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover — if I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” Branden is the embodiment of this notion. There are few things of which I am certain in this life. We don’t deserve dogs. Oreo ice cream is superior to strawberry. And Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is the playwright of our time.
I know this in my marrow. I spent the fall of 2023, and the better part of 2024, immersed in a universe he created, and it was one of the richest, most artistically fortifying experiences of my life. I began my acting career in theatre but had left it behind for the bright lights and possibilities of film and television. I found myself living in Los Angeles, after having spent the last 20-some years of my youth in New York City. I was offered a play here and there over the years, but nothing pulled me back east. The rigors of an eight-show week, constant vocal rest, living an essentially monastic life, all meant that for me to say “yes” to something, it had to be a piece of writing that burrowed itself into my bones. Ten years had gone by, and nothing took up residence, so I stayed away.
PING.
Sept. 10th, 2021
I looked at my phone. An email from my agent. The subject line: “Appropriate.” I scrolled down. “A play to be directed by Lila Neugebauer and written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.” I felt a flutter in my belly. A play by a living writer and a director I had long admired…
But. I live in LA.
I have three dogs.
I’m old, and I’m tired.
“Read it,” I thought. “Just read it. Maybe it won’t speak to you, maybe it won’t be for you, maybe it will be the greatest thing you’ve ever read!”
I don’t want to sound hyperbolic here, but facts are facts: reading the play changed my life. I said, “Yes” almost immediately, and after many fits and starts along the way, I at last found myself in New York to begin rehearsals in the late fall of 2023. That’s two years later, folks. I refused to let this one go. The thought of another actress getting to say these words literally filled me with a red-hot rage I think can only be described as nuclear, and I probably should just leave it at that.
I hadn’t been in a rehearsal hall in a decade and hadn’t done a play with a living playwright save for maybe twice in my career. Now, a living playwright can be both a blessing and a curse. When your author isn’t present for you to pepper with questions about their original intentions, you can feel both free and compromised — free to make your own choices but compromised by your own thoughts of perhaps not executing what the playwright may have dreamt of. (Because let me tell you, if Tennessee Williams had been alive to see my interpretation of Laura Wingfield, I am certain he would have taken away my Equity card himself.)
On our first day of rehearsal for Appropriate, I was sufficiently nervous. I had read the play, I believed it belonged in the canon of great American plays, and there was the writer of this masterwork sitting right across from me. But what came to be clear over the course of our rehearsal process was that, I — we, the company — had a partner in Branden. He spent as much time refining his own writing as he did helping us crack it. He was immersed with us. Branden was my lighthouse, guiding me to shore, discerning, relentless, tireless in his pursuit of truth.
My time with him working — really working — on his play revealed something vital to our survival as a society. Sitting in a dark theater, with a room full of strangers, feels almost holy. The richness of shared experiences, for all of life’s separateness, in that sacred place, brings a very potent togetherness. And everyone who goes to the theater does want something, is hoping for something. The artist is reaching, and the audience is reaching, we all want the same thing, and that is to feel seen. To be known.
Sitting in that holiest of theaters, that balmy April evening, the same theater where I had the privilege of giving voice to Branden’s words night after night, of being carried by their invincible wings, now I felt a current of joy that felt like a miracle, because there it was again! His fire, his inexorable brilliance. Purpose is the work of a fire-maker. When the smoke clears, you are down to ashes. Everything is known, and only what is indestructible remains.
The truth.
Sarah Paulson is an Emmy- and Tony-winning actress.