Cast and Creative Team Set for PURPOSE at La Jolla Playhouse
The cast of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Purpose features Andréa Agosto, Stephanie Berry, and more.
La Jolla Playhouse has revealed the cast and creative team for the West Coast premiere of Purpose, by Tony Award winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Delicia Turner Sonnenberg (Playhouse’s Derecho, The Garden), running in the Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre May 12 – June 7.
The cast features Andréa Agosto as Aziza Houston, Stephanie Berry (Playhouse’s The Garden) as Claudine Jasper, Crystal Dickinson as Morgan Jasper, Sean Boyce Johnson as Solomon “Junior” Jasper, Matthew Elijah Webb as Nazareth “Naz” Jasper and Cornell Womack as Solomon “Sonny” Jasper, along with understudies: Martha Boles, Antonio TJ Johnson and Vandous Stripling II.
The creative team includes Lawrence E. Moten III, Scenic Design; Samantha C. Jones, Costume Design; Sherrice Mojgani, Lighting Design; Lindsay Jones, Original Music and Sound Design; Alberto “Albee” Alvarado, Wig and Hair Design; tbd casting co.; Stephanie Yankwitt, CSA, and Hannah Reinert, Casting; Heather M. Brose, Stage Manager; and Alexa Burn, Assistant Stage Manager.
Fresh from winning the 2025 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Purpose is “a thumping, riveting, guns-blazing, major new American play” (NY Daily News). For decades, the influential Jasper family has been a pillar of Black American Politics: civil rights leaders, celebrity pastors and congressmen. When the youngest son returns home with an uninvited friend, long-buried secrets and tensions threaten to topple their empire. As The New York Times said: “Purpose showcases Jacobs-Jenkins’ vivid language, spitfire dialogue and sweeping sense of American history...you may have trouble catching your breath from laughing so hard.”
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