This past April, on a particularly balmy night, I walked down the aisle of the Helen Hayes theater , a storied old playhouse on 44th St. whose backstage I knew intimately but whose orchestra I wasn’t fully acquainted with and took my seat. I held in my hand a Playbill with the title Purpose blazed across it and waited for the lights to go down.

Turns out the experience of being inside a playwright’s world when performing a play on stage and sitting in the dark watching a playwright’s world come to life before you, can feel the same — if the playwright is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins .

This past April, on a particularly balmy night, I walked down the aisle of the Helen Hayes theater , a storied old playhouse on 44th St. whose backstage I knew intimately but whose orchestra I was

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