Purpose review: A hilarious and blistering family clash on Broadway

Two hours and 50 minutes, with one intermission.At the Hayes Theater, 240 West 44th Street.Plays about families coming home — and coming to blows — are a workhorse of American drama.The dinner-table clashes are reliably entertaining, easy to connect to and, you’d think, totally wrung-out by now.How can anybody freshen up something so old-hat? There are only so many ways to cook a Norman Rockwell turkey.Yet, in recent years, writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has managed to write not one, but two extraordinary examples: “Appropriate,” which snagged last year’s Tony Award for Best Play and “Purpose,” which opened Monday night at the Hayes Theater.His latest firecracker is unstoppably fierce, funny — and ruthless.I howled all the way through Jacobs-Jenkins’ clever and venomous spin on the story: This particular bombshell-littered house belongs to the Jaspers, a powerful black political dynasty whose controversies and scandals come down faster than the blizzard outside their window.If your family is anything like them, I’d recommend emancipation.The salt-and-pepper-haired dad, Solomon (Harry Lennix), is obviously modeled on Jesse Jackson.

He does not orate from behind a podium, though, but fumes behind closed doors.This imposing patriarch is also a famous minister and was an activist alongside Martin Luther King Jr.during the Civil Rights Movement. Disgracing the Jasper name is his fresh-out-of-prison eldest son, Solomon Jr.

(Glenn Davis), a state senator taken down for embezzling money.Orange jumpsuits are all the rage. Junior’s wife Morgan (Alana Arenas) is herself about to head to clink for conspiring with him. And the youngest son Nazareth (Jon Michael Hill), a sensitive nature photographer, has returned for a visit with his New York friend Aziza (Kara Young), who doesn’t realize the storm she’s walking into.Secrets are bared, stitches are violently ripped off, lives are turned upside down.You know the drill.But because o...