Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
- Born:
- December 29, 1984, Washington, D.C., U.S. (age 39)
- Awards And Honors:
- Tony Awards (2024)
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (born December 29, 1984, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an American playwright best known for his plays that deal with matters of identity and history, including race and family legacies. In 2024 his play Appropriate won three Tony Awards, including best revival of a play.
Early life and education
Jacobs-Jenkins’s mother, Patricia Jacobs, was one of the first Black women to graduate from Harvard Law School and later ran a microfilm company. His father, Benjamin Jenkins, was a dentist for the Maryland prison system. Jacobs-Jenkins’s parents were not married, and his father did not live with the rest of the family at their home in the Takoma neighborhood of Washington, D.C., though he visited often. When Jacobs-Jenkins was seven years old, his parents ended their relationship. Jacobs adopted two more children, raising them and Jacobs-Jenkins as a single parent.
Jacobs-Jenkins attended a grade school that he has described as “very progressive” and “Afrocentric in its pedagogy,” followed by a Roman Catholic high school, though the family was not Catholic. He spent summers in Arkansas with his maternal grandparents, and he became close to his grandmother, a schoolteacher who adapted biblical stories for the stage at her church. When Jacobs-Jenkins was 13 years old, his mother enrolled him in a three-week summer writing workshop for teenagers in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was initially reluctant to attend, but, as he told cultural critic Hilton Als in an interview published in Bomb magazine in 2018, the experience was formative. He returned to the workshop for the next five years.
In 2002 he enrolled at Princeton University, where he majored in anthropology but also studied fiction writing and became heavily involved in the university’s theater department. A class taught by scholar Daphne Brooks on African American theater proved to be life-changing by showing him how performance grew out of history. In his 2018 Bomb interview, he said:
I think the beginning of my career was the first day of [Brooks’s] class. I’ll never forget her saying, “I had two options for how to start this class: minstrelsy or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and I chose Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It was such a provocation! Like, why didn’t we go through door number one? What was behind door number one?
In addition, playwright Robert Sandberg, who taught Jacobs-Jenkins in an introductory playwriting class, convinced him that he should focus on writing for the stage rather than writing fiction. Among his literary influences, Jacobs-Jenkins has cited Toni Cade Bambara, August Wilson, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, and Toni Morrison.
Theater and writing career
After graduating from Princeton in 2006, Jacobs-Jenkins moved to New York City, where he enrolled in a master’s program in performance studies at New York University, earning his degree in 2007. He also began working in the fiction department of The New Yorker, where he had previously been an intern. Hilton Als, the magazine’s theater critic, became a friend and mentor to him.
In 2010 the Public Theater in New York staged Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Neighbors, in which the Crows, a Black family adorned in blackface, move to the suburbs next door to an interracial couple and their daughter. The play reflected Jacobs-Jenkins’s interest in minstrelsy and became a cause célèbre; The New York Times interviewed attendees who walked out mid-show, and reviewer Charles Isherwood panned the play.
Soon afterward Jacobs-Jenkins left for Berlin on a Fulbright scholarship. However, he returned to New York a few months later for the production of An Octoroon, an adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana. But the production was chaotic and was another humiliation for Jacobs-Jenkins’s career. For several months he bounced between Berlin, North Carolina (where he stayed with his father), and New York, all the while revising his plays and developing new projects.
His breakthrough came in 2014, when his play Appropriate debuted Off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre in New York. An unsettling family drama, it centers on a group of white siblings as they clean out their childhood home, a former plantation in Arkansas, shortly after their father’s death. The play was well reviewed, and Als commented to The New York Times that with Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins had “started to write like himself.” Sharing the honor with an improved version of An Octoroon, Appropriate won the Obie Award for best new American play.
Jacobs-Jenkins’s career started to soar. At the same time, he expressed concerns about being typecast. He told The New York Times in 2014:
I’m told that I’m writing about race when I feel I’m actually just telling stories about people in the same way as these writers who are heroes to me.…I feel even now when I have meetings with various film executives, I wait for the moment where someone brings up the words “civil rights” or “Black Panther.” It’s a thing that I think every artist of color has to deal with.
Jacobs-Jenkins topped this success in 2016, when his play Gloria, a workplace comedy about young staffers at a prestigious magazine, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for drama. That same year he won a Windham-Campbell Prize for literature and a MacArthur Fellowship.
He was nominated again for a Pulitzer in 2018 for his drama Everybody, a contemporary take on Everyman, a 15th-century morality play that uses allegory to impart moral lessons on death and the fate of the human soul. In Jacobs-Jenkins’s intriguing reimagining, the cast members are assigned their roles via a lottery before each performance; therefore, each actor in the cast at some point plays the protagonist Everybody, who must confront the mystery of mortality.
Jacobs-Jenkins also worked in television, serving as consulting producer on the HBO miniseries Watchmen (2019) and the series Outer Range (2022). He also served as the executive producer and writer of the TV series Kindred, which aired on FX in 2022. The show was an adaptation of Octavia Butler’s 1979 science-fiction novel of the same name, in which a Black woman is sent back in time to a pre-Civil War plantation, becomes enslaved, and rescues her white, slave-owning ancestor. At the time of the show’s debut, Jacobs-Jenkins told Time, “I come from the theater and I’ve done a lot of work on slavery; in some ways, it’s been the material of my life.”
In 2022 he contributed original material to a Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s 1942 comedy The Skin of Our Teeth. The following year, he at last made his Broadway debut with one of his own works, a revival of Appropriate starring Sarah Paulson and Elle Fanning and directed by Lila Neugebauer. The production was nominated for eight Tony Awards, winning in the categories of best lead actress, lighting design, and revival of a play.
In 2024 Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago premiered Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose. Directed by Phylicia Rashad (best known for playing the matriarch on The Cosby Show), the play portrays the family reunion of members of a powerful Black political dynasty. In an interview with NewCity, Jacobs-Jenkins acknowledged that its themes are similar to those of Appropriate: “Everything I write is in response to something else I’ve written.”
Teaching career and honors
Jacobs-Jenkins has taught at New York University, the Juilliard School, Hunter College, and the University of Texas at Austin. In 2021 he joined the faculty of Yale University. Among his many honors, he was awarded the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award by the Sundance Institute in 2013 and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2020.