“How do we refresh our language? Why do we still use, like, a 150-year-old classification system to talk about people? It's so weird! We still call people black and white?”
0 likes
Author detail
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an American playwright. His play Purpose won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for which his works Gloria and Everybody were finalists in 2016 and 2018, respectively. His play Appropriate marked his Broadway debut as a playwright in 2023 and earned him his first Tony Award; he won a second in 2025 for Purpose. His additional plays include An Octoroon and The Comeuppance. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016.
Quotes
Showing 1-5 of 5
“How do we refresh our language? Why do we still use, like, a 150-year-old classification system to talk about people? It's so weird! We still call people black and white?”
0 likes
“The stuff I write about doesn't, like, necessarily leave people feeling warm and fuzzy. I'm writing in a territory that's, like, contested and full of prickliness. And I find that people pro...”
0 likes
“'An Octoroon' was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I'm writing about America's relationship to its own history. Race or not, it's a story about suppression and oppressio...”
0 likes
“'A Streetcar Named Desire' is the play I've probably read the most times in my life, and I love the weirdness of all the scene outs but especially the end of the second scene, when Williams...”
0 likes
“I go through phases of watching a ton of dance/performance, and I am bizarrely well-informed on the subject.”
0 likes