PURPOSE Makes Australian Premiere at Sydney Theatre Company
Purpose won the 2025 Tony Award for Best Play.
After claiming the 2025 Tony Award for Best Play, the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2025 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Purpose is set for its next major milestone: a new production at Sydney Theatre Company. Opening February 2026 at STC’s Wharf 1 Theatre, it marks the play’s Australian debut and first staging since its celebrated Broadway premiere.
Directed by Zindzi Okenyo (Sweat) and featuring actors Grace Bentley-Tsibuah, Deni Gordon, Markus Hamilton, Tinashe Mangwana, Maurice Marvel Meredith and Sisi Stringer, Purpose is a family drama about an influential African American family on the highest pedestal of politics, producing congressmen, celebrity pastors and civil rights leaders. 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 – whose previous TONY Award-winning play Appropriate thrilled STC audiences in 2021 – masterstroke is “a sparring match, crackling with sharp punchlines, pulling us into an all-out brawl” (New York Magazine).
Director Zindzi Okenyo says Purpose is ‘’another exceptional offering’’ from Branden Jacobs-Jenkins:
“While giving the audience pure entertainment and an incredible showcase for the actors involved, he is a master at social and political commentary. I love this play, it is truly an ‘actor’s piece’, and I know this terrific cast will create extraordinary work’’.
The first play to open his first season as Sydney Theatre Company Artistic Director, Mitchell Butel saw the Broadway production during a trip to New York in May 2025 and says Purpose is “quite simply one of the best plays I’ve seen in decades.’’
“I had the great good fortune to see the originating Steppenwolf production of the play on my last day in New York after checking in on Sydney Theatre Company’s The Picture of Dorian Gray on Broadway and I was completely blown over. Had I not had to get my flight home to Sydney that night, I would have gone back in for seconds immediately. Purpose takes a great tradition of American theatre – the family dinner gone wrong – and turns it completely on its head and with savage, genius mischief that explores power, hypocrisy, marital discord but also how to navigate a path towards freedom and truth amidst it all. The play is dark, hilarious and brilliant and I know Zindzi’s fresh take on it will shine just as brightly.”
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