Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, on Broadway at Last

Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur Fellow and a Pulitzer finalist, changes genre each time he writes: he was a postmodern provocateur with the Obie Award-winning “An Octoroon”; a gallows satirist with the workplace thriller “Gloria”; and a contemporizer of fifteenth-century Christian allegory with “Everybody.” Here, he’s an American realist, or, more accurately, a pasticheur of American realists such as Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Realism in this style of family-revelation play can be just another disguise for melodrama, so we also see that older, broader form peeking through: a plot that hinges on secrets that are revealed almost too late, and a lightning-stark ethical landscape in which sin is met with fitting, if delayed, punishment.