Now Jacobs-Jenkins is back at the Hayes with “Purpose,” another thrilling battle royale in which, once again, a fractious family clashes over the course of a long night in a stately home. This interior, though, designed by Todd Rosenthal for the director Phylicia Rashad, is warm and welcoming and bright, an orange-walled great room backed by a curved staircase. Artifacts of Black heritage are everywhere. On the first floor, there’s a shrine to Martin Luther King, Jr.—a portrait with a Bible open beneath it—and, up in a second-floor gallery, we see vintage pictures of the family patriarch, standing by King’s side. The family’s younger son, Naz (Jon Michael Hill), is a garrulous and wry narrator: he spends much of the play explaining backstory or, less usefully, hinting at what’s to come. “My father, the Honorable Reverend Solomon Jasper,” he says, gesturing to the portrait at the head of the stairs. “Some of you may be familiar with him, some of you not so much—and that’s fine.” He adds, dryly, “I guess it depends on how much you care about the American Civil Rights Movement.” (Hill, whose charismatic performance buoys pages of torrential monologue, often implicates the audience, to excellent comedic effect.) The person we’re actually meant to recognize in Solomon (Harry Lennix) is the Reverend Jesse Jackson. When Naz’s friend Aziza (Kara Young) gets starstruck at meeting Solomon, she rhapsodizes about seeing a poster of him in her childhood classroom, emblazoned with his catchphrase (“Hope is right there!”), close kin to Jackson’s “Keep hope alive.” Still, Naz, whose solitary ways confuse his family, very much wishes that Aziza wasn’t meeting his adamantine mother, Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), or his famous father, or his ex-state-senator older brother, Junior (Glenn Davis), recently incarcerated for embezzling campaign funds. This last character borrows from the real Jesse Jackson, Jr., who pleaded guilty to fraud. His wife, here named Morgan (Alana Arenas), is in legal trouble, too; her anger betrays itself via wonderful little volcanic rumbles. Dinner, inevitably, unleashes a hilarious war of all against all. In his work, Jacobs-Jenkins dexterously plays meta-theatrical games. When he’s in an experimental vein, he might fold in verbatim sections from other artists: in his masterpiece, “An Octoroon,” he reframes a nineteenth-century melodrama by Dion Boucicault and has a playwright character, named BJJ, make tart comments. His Broadway plays are less overtly postmodern, but there’s still a patchwork of influences below the surface. In “Purpose,” Solomon shouts hypocritically about “truth” in the same way Big Daddy does in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” for example, and we register the echo. Jacobs-Jenkins incorporates several Jackson-family scandals, but he’s also riffing on “Appropriate” and its same concerns: moral collapse, legacy, race. In “Appropriate,” we’re meant to judge characters by their reaction to finding a book of lynching photographs in the house; in “Purpose,” the contested book is a bound set of letters that Claudine wrote to Junior while he was in prison. Junior shocks his father by saying that he hopes to publish them—apparently, he is prepared to exploit the family name to reclaim his career. And where “Appropriate” buzzed hellishly with cicadas, this play hums with references to a hive of bees, kept by Solomon. Purpose, for the younger generation, is an extension of the individual will—and is thus confusing—but for Solomon purpose is a God-given design, like the bees’ busy dancing. “For the Lord of hosts hath purposed, and who shall disannul it?” Isaiah asked. The movement that Solomon expected his sons to carry on has splintered, and so he looks at his family and feels very disannulled indeed. Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company commissioned Jacobs-Jenkins to write “Purpose” nine years ago. (Davis, one of the playwright’s original inspirations, is now the company’s co-artistic director.) That’s a long time, and “Purpose” does feel like a play made in several modes—sometimes broad, insult-fest comedy, sometimes discursive realism. The sheer ease of Jacobs-Jenkins’s writing drives the headlong rush of the first act, but in the unbalanced second half his technique wavers. Naz’s constant direct-address interruptions pall, and various Chekhov’s-gun scenarios feel effortfully deployed. Thankfully, the extended gestation also means that Rashad’s production comes to New York from Chicago with much of its superb Steppenwolf cast intact. (Only Young and Jackson are new additions.) Every actor gets an aria-like monologue, which throws off the play’s rhythm, but at least each one is a bravura showpiece. Perhaps that’s where the real promise of “Purpose” lies—in the idea that somehow every member of a family (or of a movement) can be sustained by our attention, rather than our worship. So much precious energy is wasted on building people into icons and tearing them down. Can there be a form of recognition that avoids celebrity? Steppenwolf’s own ensemble model shows the way. But, then, it’s all tour-de-force performance. Here is the ideal of a Chekhov company, in which even the tiniest part is being played by the best actor onstage. Scott may well be the finest actor of his generation; he’s certainly the finest Sonia—Vanya’s niece, who absorbs her own terrible romantic disappointments with an everyday saintliness—that I’ve seen in twenty years. Scott’s musicality is so precise that I cannot describe it without thinking of a singer’s phrasing, or of a violinist’s bowing. He controls not only vocal timbre but also other subharmonics, creating an incredible tension in the room. You know how sometimes, as a violinist plays, you sense the rosin against the strings? It’s like that. In a night full of tearful pauses, Yates and the designer Rosanna Vize, one of the show’s four creators, also find several ways to produce a sense of farce. (Characters are constantly stumbling through a freestanding door into awkward situations.) The show’s own concept is gently laughed at, too. At one point, Scott acts out holding back an eager dog that wants to get to its bowl. “Where’ve you been?” he asks the dog he’s just made up through mime. Everything, even the Chaplinesque way Scott dances between acts, operates in service of Chekhov’s core wisdom—that grief does not end, but we can wear it lightly. In Stephens’s cleverest touch, he shifts our understanding of where Vanya’s sorrow lies, situating it not in his adoration of the unavailable Helena but in the loss of his sister, Sonia’s late mother, represented by a player piano onstage. A Gestalt therapist would tell us that in our dreams all the figures are really aspects of ourselves. This “Vanya” is that kind of dream, and so we see Scott, playing a brief duet with no one, in mourning for his sister’s life and his own—and, really, every life there is. ♦