Lewis Center Advisory Council member, Princeton alum, and past faculty member Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ’06 won the 2025 Tony Award for Best New Play for Purpose. This is Jenkins’ second Tony Award; last year his play Appropriate won the award for Best Revival of a Play. Past Program in Theater faculty member Sam Pinkleton also won a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for Oh, Mary!.
Jacobs-Jenkins’ play, Purpose, explores the complex dynamics and legacy of the Jaspers, an upper middle class African-American family whose patriarch was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement. The play also won a Pulitzer Prize in Drama and a Drama Desk Award earlier this year. When the son returns home with an uninvited friend, the family is forced into a reckoning with itself, its faith, and its legacy. The Pulitzer Prize announcement called Purpose “a skillful blend of drama and comedy that probes how different generations define heritage,” while New York magazine notes, “Purpose channels everything from August Wilson to Tennessee Williams. It is a sparring match, crackling with sharp punchlines, pulling us into an all-out brawl.”
In accepting his Tony at the awards ceremony on June 8 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, Jacobs-Jenkins thanked, among others, his teachers, with a special shout-out to to Bob Sandberg, a now-retired lecturer in theater and English who taught at Princeton from 1995 to 2021, and who is a fellow playwright and a Princeton Class of 1970 alumnus.
Jacobs-Jenkins (Princeton Class of 2006) is a Brooklyn-based playwright and producer. Other recent theater credits include The Comeuppance (Signature Theatre, NYC; Almeida Theatre, London), Girls (Yale Rep), Everybody (Signature Theatre), War (Yale Rep; Lincoln Center/LCT3), Gloria (Vineyard Theatre), An Octoroon (Obie Award; Soho Rep, Theatre for a New Audience), and Neighbors (The Public Theater). He was showrunner, executive producer, and writer for HULU/FX’s drama series, Kindred, based on Octavia E. Butler’s groundbreaking novel. Jacobs-Jenkins currently teaches at Yale University and serves as Vice President of the Dramatists Guild council and on the boards of Soho Rep, Park Avenue Armory, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation. His additional honors include a USA Artists fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the MacArthur fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award. At Princeton, Jacobs-Jenkins has taught “Intermediate Playwriting” in the past for the Program in Theater & Music Theater and recently co-led the Princeton Atelier course “Darkness and Light: Writing, Lighting, Blackness and Whiteness.” He is currently writing the book for the upcoming stage adaptation of Purple Rain.
Jacobs-Jenkins’ play The Comeuppance will be performed as part of the theater program’s 2025-26 season at the Berlind Theatre in April.
Pinkleton is a director and choreographer based in Los Angeles. His past work on Broadway includes Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Choreography. At the Lewis Center, Pinkleton taught the Program in Theater & Music Theater course “Theater Rehearsal and Performance” during the fall of 2020. Meeting during the global pandemic, Pinkleton virtually led students through an investigative, performance-driven process to create a joyous, living archive of lives that had ended. The digital archive created by the class offered space for proposals, reflections, indictments, celebrations and imagined alternatives to a world numbed by an ambush of death.
