Purpose
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, Gravity Forms
YEAR
2025
EXTERNAL URL
The 2025 Tony Award winner for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A Steppenwolf-to-Broadway transfer directed by Phylicia Rashad, with frontend layout work that pushed beyond standard production site conventions — asymmetric grids and overlapping content sections that demanded precise CSS across breakpoints.
Led the technical delivery at Situation Interactive.
Background
A Pulitzer Prize-winning play was transferring from Chicago to Broadway and needed a digital platform ready for opening night.
Purpose — written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the Tony Award-winning playwright of Appropriate, and directed by two-time Tony winner Phylicia Rashad — premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago during the 2023-2024 season before transferring to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre. The play is an epic family drama centered on the Jaspers — a powerful Black American family whose lineage includes civil rights leaders, pastors, and congressmen — and the reckoning that unfolds when the youngest son returns home with an uninvited guest. The production arrived with a cast led by Harry Lennix, Jon Michael Hill, Glenn Davis, Kara Young, Alana Arenas, and LaTanya Richardson Jackson. In a season where I was simultaneously building sites for Maybe Happy Ending, Smash, and other high-profile productions, Purpose stood out for its restraint — the design needed to match the weight of the material without competing with it.
Previews began February 25, 2025 with an official opening on March 17 — the site needed to be ready to absorb the critical response from day one.
Implementation
A custom WordPress build with a ticketing calendar and frontend layouts that pushed beyond the typical Broadway site.
The frontend was the primary challenge. The design called for layouts that broke from standard Broadway production site conventions — asymmetric grids, overlapping content sections, and typographic treatments that demanded precise CSS positioning across breakpoints. Every layout decision had to hold up on mobile without sacrificing the visual tension that made the desktop compositions compelling. Compare this to the Smash build happening in the same window: where Smash was cinematic and maximalist, Purpose was architecturally sparse — black, white, and warm grays with a typographic hierarchy built on uppercase headings and generous spacing. The restraint made every element heavier. The ticketing calendar followed the same proven Telecharge integration pattern, and the broader site carried hero video content with YouTube integration, cast and creative team profiles, and press acclaim sections aggregating reviews from the New York Times, Washington Post, Vogue, and the New Yorker.
The comp looked simple — the CSS architecture behind it was anything but. Restraint in design often means more precision in code.
Results
Tony Award for Best Play, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, $15 million at the box office.
Purpose won the 2025 Tony Award for Best Play, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play — a clean sweep of every major dramatic honor. Kara Young won Best Featured Actress in a Play. The run averaged 96.55% capacity across 192 performances and 22 previews at the Helen Hayes Theatre, grossing over $15.1 million at an average ticket price of $124.91. The production played its final performance on August 31, 2025. In the same Tony ceremony, Maybe Happy Ending won Best Musical — meaning two of my builds took the top prize in their respective categories on the same night.
Two builds, two top Tony Awards, one ceremony. That is not something you plan for — but the infrastructure was ready when it happened.
