Tony Award Winning Playwright and Likely Heir to Tennessee Williams Is Coming to St. Louis

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' visit makes this year's Tennessee Williams 2026 Festival one of the most important theater events in recent St. Louis history.

by Grayling Holmes

Every generation produces a handful of playwrights who redefine American theater. Tennessee Williams was one. Edward Albee was another. Today, many critics believe Branden Jacobs-Jenkins belongs on that list.

Tony Award winning playwright Branden-Jacobs Jenkins

This September, St. Louis audiences will have the rare opportunity to meet him.

The two-time Tony Award winner, Pulitzer Prize winner, MacArthur Fellow, and one of the most celebrated playwrights working today will appear at the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis for "A Conversation with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins" on Saturday, September 19, at the Clark Family Branch of the St. Louis County Library.

For theater lovers, this is much more than an author talk.

It is a chance to hear directly from the playwright many consider the artistic heir to Tennessee Williams—a writer whose work explores complicated families, buried secrets, moral ambiguity, and the emotional landscapes that made Williams America's greatest dramatist.

The appearance is especially meaningful because it accompanies the Festival's boldest artistic decision in its eleven-year history.

For the first time, the Tennessee Williams Festival will headline a play not written by Tennessee Williams.

Instead, audiences will experience Jacobs-Jenkins' acclaimed Appropriate, a Southern Gothic masterpiece that earned two Tony Awards during its celebrated Broadway revival and has become one of the defining American plays of the twenty-first century.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the team of Appropriate accept the 2024 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play at the 77th Annual Tony Awards on Sunday June 16, 2024.

For Executive Artistic Director Carrie Houk, the decision began not in a boardroom but in a New York theater.

While attending another Branden Jacobs-Jenkins production, she found herself having an unexpected realization.

"My God," she remembers thinking, "this could be The Glass Menagerie or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof of our era."

"It was magnificent," Houk recalls.

Back in her hotel room, curiosity led her to Google the playwright. What she discovered changed the direction of the Festival.

One of Jacobs-Jenkins' greatest artistic inspirations was Tennessee Williams.

That revelation led Houk to Appropriate, a darkly comic family drama set in a decaying Arkansas plantation home where three siblings gather to settle their late father's estate, only to confront generations of long-buried secrets involving race, inheritance, identity, and memory.

The Williams connection was unmistakable.

"I think audiences will immediately see the connection with Tennessee Williams," Houk says. "And I do believe that if Mr. Williams were alive today, he would be applauding us loudly for forging ahead with this."

That philosophy became the inspiration for this year's Festival theme: The Tennessee Effect.

Rather than looking backward alone, the Festival examines how Williams continues to shape contemporary theater nearly half a century after his death. His influence can still be seen in playwrights who explore fractured families, poetic language, complicated desires, and the emotional truths hidden beneath polite conversation.

Few embody that influence more profoundly than Jacobs-Jenkins.

His Pulitzer Prize-winning Purpose, Tony Award-winning Appropriate, and acclaimed plays Everybody, Gloria, An Octoroon, and The Comeuppance have established him as perhaps the most important American playwright of his generation. Today, he teaches at Yale University while serving as Vice President of the Dramatists Guild Council.

Branden Jacobs Jenkins accepts Pulitzer Prize for his play “Purpose”

Convincing someone of Jacobs-Jenkins' stature to appear in St. Louis was no small accomplishment.

After months of persistence, Houk and the Festival succeeded in bringing him here, giving local audiences an opportunity rarely available outside New York, Chicago, or major national theater conferences.

For St. Louis theatergoers, this is a remarkable moment.

Playwrights of Jacobs-Jenkins' caliber seldom make public appearances in the Midwest, let alone participate in intimate conversations about their creative process and artistic influences. His discussion with Villanova University theater scholar Dr. Bess Rowen promises to explore not only his own award-winning work but also the enduring influence Tennessee Williams continues to have on American drama.

It is, in many ways, exactly what Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis was created to celebrate.

Not simply preserving Williams' remarkable legacy, but demonstrating that his voice still echoes through today's greatest playwrights.

For longtime Festival patrons, Appropriate may become one of the most talked-about productions in the organization's history.

For newcomers, it offers an ideal introduction to the living legacy of Tennessee Williams.

And for anyone who loves great theater, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' visit is likely to be remembered as one of the most significant cultural events St. Louis has hosted in years.

Again, the talk takes place at the Clark Family Branch of the St. Louis County Library on Saturday, September 19, (two days into the 11-day festival). It is free and open to the public. A limited number of seats are available. For more information, please visit TWSTL.org.