Kara Young Can Transform Ordinary Characters Into Compelling Portrayals Of The Often Invisible

Young has been steadily building name recognition and critical appraisal, becoming the first Black woman to earn Tony nominations in three straight seasons, for Cost of Living, Clydes and Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch. In 2024, Young won the Tony for her performance as Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, a role originated by legendary actor Ruby Dee.

All three works were standouts, notable for their focus on regular folks making meaning in unglamorous and often invisible lives. Cost of Living, by Martyna Majok, and Clydes, by Lynn Nottage, were both awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Purlie Victorious, a sharply riotous but equally sensitive satire by Ossie Davis, had not been revived on stage since its original Broadway run in 1961. (A 1963 film adaptation, starring Davis as Purlie and his wife, Dee, as Lutiebelle, called Gone Are the Days, can be found on YouTube ).

Those unacquainted with Youngs theater repertoire may know her as Jones from Prime Videos Im a Virgo, the 2023 Boots Riley comedy series in which Jharrel Jerome stars as a Bay Area man who is transformed in Kafka-esque fashion into a 13-foot giant. She was also part of the delightful mlange of Black Brooklyn weirdo bohemia captured in Random Acts of Flyness.

When I spoke to Young at her Harlem apartment via Zoom, she was squeezing me in before heading downtown to rehearse the romantic comedy Table 17 at MCC Theater. She was sporting a curly pixie, dyed lavender, and behind her hung an enormous portrait by Tim Okamura called The Thespian (2021). Its the second portrait hes painted of her. The first was a 2018 collage called I Love Your Locs .

Young has built an eclectic rsum full of soulful, ambitious work that challenges audiences in a way that puts her in league with artists like Cicely Tyson, Andr Holland and the late Chadwick Boseman.

In 2019, Young starred off-Broadway in Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, a comedy by Stephen Adly Guirgis set in a New York City halfway house. In Cost of Living, Young played Jess, a Princeton-educated caregiver who has little patience for her clients skepticism about her capabilities.

I feel like Im actively seeking it out, energetically, wanting to be a part of revolutionary storytelling, Young said. Lynn Nottage, Martyna Majok and Ossie Davis are all really challenging the capitalistic structure of our America, of our society. I dont really understand my involvement except the fact that I want to tell those stories. I feel honored to even open the page and read the play. First table read, to me, is always the most beautiful. The first table read rehearsal or the first table read workshop is just the most beautiful, visceral. Nothing is there yet. None of the elements are there. Theres no costume. Nothing is there yet, and youre able to imagine the world.

The work is in service, Young continued. Im in service of the work thats a part of a bigger picture, a larger picture that almost has little or nothing to do with me.

Young is slight and notably doe-eyed physical traits that can sometimes morph into constraints for female actors, as it makes them attractive to directors who want to cast them as children or adolescents. Its exactly this physical presence that makes Youngs performance as Lutiebelle in Purlie Victorious so engaging.

She plays an Alabama hayseed who is rescued by Rev. Purlie Judson (Leslie Odom Jr.) and brought to a Georgia plantation owned by Ol Capn Cotchipee (Jay O. Sanders) to engage in a bit of righteous identity fraud, which, if it goes according to plan, will give Rev. Purlie ownership of the plantations chapel. Cotchipee, through sheer stubbornness and the threat of his notorious bullwhip, has managed to keep his plantation operating as close to the circumstances of slavery as he can possibly muster, even though the play takes place 100 years after the Civil War has ended and the plantation folk are not enslaved, they are sharecroppers.

Youngs Lutiebelle also conveys a sense of grown-woman bodily agency. Its a sensitive, potentially treacherous feat, particularly because of the implied sexual threat the comparatively enormous Cotchipee represents as a holdout of a Confederate way of life. Unlike the horrors contained within Oscar Micheauxs Within Our Gates, however, Cotchipees lechery is less threatening and more patronizing. Purlie takes it upon himself to avenge Lutiebell after Cotchipee corners her and kisses and pinches her cheeks.