“I’m becoming obsessed with people’s relationships and inner landscapes,” the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins recently told Vogue. Following the success of Appropriate—which ran on Broadway last season with Sarah Paulson and Corey Stoll—Jacobs-Jenkins returns to the New York stage with Purpose, a decade-long project that premiered in Chicago last year, directed by Phylicia Rashad. The play is set in the household of the Jaspers, an influential Black family whose members include civil rights leaders, pastors, and politicians. When their artistic youngest son, Nazareth, comes home with an unexpected friend, Aziza, and a snowstorm strands her there, long-held tensions unravel a seemingly flawless family. New to the cast are Kara Young and LaTanya Richardson Jackson. —Jeanne Malle