'Purpose' Wins Big and Makes History at the 2025 Tony Awards
Purpose has made history at the 2025 Tony Awards.
Written by 2024 Tony Award winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Purpose has taken some of the evening's top prizes.
Jacobs-Jenkins, who won the Tony Award for best revival of a play for Appropriate just last year, has become the first Black playwright to win the Tony for Best Play since August Wilson took home the award in 1987 for Fences.
In total, the play has celebrated two wins so far, with Kara Young taking home the prize for Best Featured Actress in a Play. Young made history of her own, becoming the first Black person to be nominated four times consecutively and the first Black performer to win two back-to-back Tonys.
Purpose is not just your average family drama. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play follows one evening with the Jaspers, a prominent Chicago household known for their influential history within Black American politics. But like all families, not everything is as it seems. When the youngest son returns home to Illinois with an uninvited friend, the family is forced to face deep truths and challenge their ideologies. Directed by the legendary Phylicia Rashad, Purpose stars also LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix, Jon Michael Hill, Alana Arenas and Glenn Davis
The Tony Awards honor the best Broadway musicals and plays—as well as the greatest actors, crews, and behind-the-scenes Broadway creatives—of the past year. And this season is a particularly starry one, with a number of movie, TV, and music stars holding main roles in the featured musicals and plays.
Other big stars nominated tonight include George Clooney for his record-breaking play Good Night, and Good Luck, Nicole Scherzinger for Sunset Blvd., Sadie Sink for John Proctor is the Villain, Mia Farrow for The Roommate, Darren Criss for Maybe Happy Ending, Jonathan Groff for Just In Time, and Audra McDonald for Gypsy.
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