Omari K. Chancellor and Kalyne Ashley Coleman in The Huntington’s production of Purpose. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin)
Two plays, currently on view in Boston, were written eighty years apart and yet are two versions of the same story. All My Sons, Arthur Miller‘s iconic 1947 drama, is at the Lyric Stage. Purpose, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award–winning play from 2025, is at the Huntington. Both productions are so well done, and I recommend them highly.
It was an unexpected gift to have seen these two plays performed in close succession because sometimes I need a double dose to get what I am really feeling. It’s like viewing the Grand Canyon during limited visibility, then watching what happens as the cloud cover lifts. It begins with a feeling of awe, moving to stunned, and then eventually — let’s be honest — a vertiginous sense of overwhelm. These two plays are traditional “family dramas,” but they also speak to much larger questions of how we live with kinship, relational webs, and our ecological belonging.
The shape of the story is similar in both plays. A flawed father sits at the center of a household with a secret, something known but not spoken. The household has organized its emotional weather system around not naming that buried truth. There is a wife who accommodates. She does not just tolerate this arrangement but actively maintains it, smoothing it out to be presentable to the outside world. Meanwhile two sons absorb the cost of this deep family deception, as the distortion moves into the next generation and does its damage on delay.
In Miller’s play, everyman Midwesterner Joe Keller has shipped defective parts to the war effort and let his partner take the blame, and his household has reorganized itself around this unspoken fact. In Jacobs-Jenkins’s play, a celebrated African American Civil Rights patriarch must keep his private truth out of view in order to preserve his legacy.
This notion of the family “system” has a long history and has often gone unquestioned. But watching it break down in these two plays has parallels to what we see now in the larger culture. We are living through a period of rampant deceit, where the public good has become obscured and difficult to locate. So many people cannot or will not distinguish the fabricated from the real. And as the lies get louder and deeper, the outcomes are increasingly destructive and dystopic. Patriarchy has a legacy that is deep and complex, and its dismantling is not a simple demo job.
What moved me most in seeing these two plays was Naz, the youngest son in Purpose. He wants no part of what his family calls life: coupling, family-building, the fraught apparatus his parents and his brother have organized themselves around and suffered inside of. He describes himself to his father as asexual, but he does not see himself as lacking. Instead, he is looking elsewhere for a way to find authentic, rhapsodic connection. Working as a nature photographer, he has found his deepest resonance with the natural world. He is the only character in either play who is constructing a life outside the structure of traditional family relationships, declining to claim that very loaded inheritance.
Naz offers an exit ramp from what can feel like an inexorably fraught path. Yes, he sees that his family is broken. But he offers the possibility of constructing a life and finding connection that can happen outside the ancient and often destructive form that is traditional marriage and family. His character is a reminder that this is not a “natural” law but an inherited architectural form, one that is old and load-bearing only because we keep agreeing to stand in it. Naz has chosen to step off. He does not replace it with another version of family but with a deep relationship to something larger than him that is less human-shaped. The play lets us read that choice as coming from a new energy, not deficiency.
Neither play argues that the traditional family structure should be abolished. But Naz’s way of being in the world is offered up as a genuine alternative, not a quirky exception. Old forms insist on being inevitable, until they aren’t. These plays reinforced my belief (and hope) that we actually might be closer to a broader set of options going forward.
Purpose, at the Calderwood Pavilion, runs through October 11.
All My Sons, at the Lyric Stage, runs through October 18.