Event Description
- Duration: 2 hours 50 minutes – including interval.
- Content advice: Gunshot, strong language, mature themes including mental illness.
Australian premiere
In an exciting coup, the most awarded new American play of 2025 is heading this way. Fresh from winning the 2025 Tony Award for Best Play, the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2025 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, Purpose comes directly from Broadway to Sydney Theatre Company in the first new production to be staged since its premiere.
An influential African American family stands firmly on the highest pedestal of American politics; producing congressmen, celebrity pastors and civil rights leaders. But when their estranged, youngest son, Nazareth, returns home with an uninvited house guest, decades of secrets and unresolved tensions threaten to topple their empire.
Channelling great American playwrights from Arthur Miller to Tracy Letts (August: Osage County), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' (Appropriate) masterstroke is “a sparring match, crackling with sharp punchlines, pulling us into an all-out brawl” (New York Magazine).
Directed by Zindzi Okenyo (Sweat) and featuring actors Deni Gordon, Markus Hamilton, Tinashe Mangwana and Sisi Stringer, Purpose is a “merciless dissection of hypocrisy – you may have trouble catching your breath from laughing so hard” (The New York Times).
- Playwright: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
- Directed by: Zindzi Okenyo
- Cast includes: Deni Gordon, Markus Hamilton, Tinashe Mangwana and Sisi Stringer
