Culture ShiftersOct. 21, 2024

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

Written By Soraya Nadia McDonaldPhotography by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

The Tony Award winner has found brilliant ways to challenge audiences from the stage just like several theater luminaries before her.

This profile is part of our Culture Shifters series, which highlights people who are changing the way we think about the world around us. To read about our other Culture Shifters, return to the list here.

Kara Young is a mass of contradictions: an old soul in a young woman’s body. A petite person whose presence regularly engulfs stages, theaters and the audiences within them. She is an artist who sees herself as a “Black vessel” for words, ideas and traditions that stretch through generations but who studiously, self-consciously avoids any air of pretension. 

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,” “Clyde’s” 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 “Clyde’s,” 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 Young’s theater repertoire may know her as Jones from Prime Video’s “I’m 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 mélange 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). It’s the second portrait he’s painted of her. The first was a 2018 collage called “I Love Your Locs.”

Young has built an eclectic résumé full of soulful, ambitious work that challenges audiences in a way that puts her in league with artists like Cicely Tyson, André 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 client’s skepticism about her capabilities. 

“I feel like I’m 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 don’t 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. There’s no costume. Nothing is there yet, and you’re able to imagine the world.

“The work is in service,” Young continued. “I’m in service of the work that’s 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. It’s exactly this physical presence that makes Young’s 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’ Cap’n 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 plantation’s 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.

Young’s Lutiebelle also conveys a sense of grown-woman bodily agency. It’s 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 Micheaux’s “Within Our Gates,” however, Cotchipee’s 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.

In “Clyde’s,” Young brought vibrance and humanity to Letitia, one of several previously incarcerated people attempting to build post-prison lives by working at a truck stop’s sandwich shop. One of Young’s co-stars in “Clyde’s,” Ron Cephas Jones (father of Broadway performer Jasmine Cephas Jones) died in August 2023, sending a ripple of grief through New York’s Black theater community. Cephas Jones’ Montrellous was propelled by a desire to pursue and connect with the metaphysical, the spiritual leader of the titular sandwich shop, holding the company together onstage and off.

His death brought with it serious heartbreak because he wasn’t just another colleague. This summer, Young and Jasmine were both guests at a friend’s wedding in Mexico City. The two women had never spent much time together stateside, but there, they danced together, allowing Ron’s memory to lift them. Jasmine, Young said, sports the same “beautiful spirit” as her father.

“I had the pleasure of hearing his stories, beyond him being a masterful storyteller on stage,” Young said of Cephas Jones. “He had the most epic stories about his life that he would share with us, and we would be right there to listen. It did not pass me that I was working with a treasure of the theater… it just didn’t pass me how precious this moment was.”

It’s a tricky task for any artist seeking to fill their days with work that is both meaningful and pays the rent, and yet Young has managed to maintain this balance since graduating from the New York Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in 2010.

Her work is never so self-serious as to be didactic, but her latest play, “Table 17,” still felt like something of a departure. 

In “Table 17,” Young gets to shine as a vivacious, contemporary adult millennial. The production is a farcical three-hander about a previously betrothed couple, Jada (Young) and Dallas (Biko-Eisen Martin), who are finally able to engage peacefully about their past relationship over drinks and appetizers at the spot where they had their first date. 

As their extremely fey waiter (Michael Rishawn) checks in with them over the course of the evening, he finds himself sucked into the role of spectator to their emotional messes, declaring the scene at one point to be a “nigganovela.” The play, written by Douglas Lyons (“Chicken & Biscuits”) and directed by Zhailon Levingston, gives Young the space to be grown, sexy, flawed and free in a manner reminiscent of a previous Harlemite whose stage presence was inverse to her stature: Tyson in “Neighbors.”

As thorough as ever, Young delights in the smug pleasures of reminding her ex of what he’s missing; she turns herself into Beyoncé from the “Crazy in Love” video, replacing the white tank top with a more adult oversize button-up shirt, set off by a fake engagement ring and a pair of high-heel pumps to show off her gams. 

“Kara really sees acting as a high-level athletic sport, and being in a room with her is being with a high-level athlete trying to attune their instrument in order to play as best they can play,” Levingston said.

Young, who was born in Harlem Hospital to Belizian immigrant parents, attended school in Spanish Harlem, nurtured by a Black immigrant diaspora of Puerto Ricans, Trinidadians and Mexicans, then went to a Jewish after-school program.

The city provided endless fuel for Young’s appetite for observation. Harlem, for Young, is a place that allowed her to become a “global citizen.”

In May, Young, having just collected her third straight Tony nomination, starred in an encore run of NSangou Njikam’s “Syncing Ink,” which celebrates the power of words through hip-hop and Yoruba traditions. 

“When you are walking down the block, you overhear people’s conversations,” she said. “Some kind of commotion happening over there, you’re stopping and watching. You watch a woman pick what bouquet of flowers she’s going to buy. There’s theater everywhere in a dollar store aisle. So I feel like the access to a city, even on a subway, even at a club, even at a whatever — there’s something to soak in, soak up and remember.”

Levingston describes an artist who isn’t yet completely convinced of the reality of her own power, talent and rigor. It may sound odd, considering the way Young has cemented her reputation for commanding the stage.

To experience a Kara Young performance is to surrender to a force that charms, tickles and captivates. But, like everything else, the self-doubt that feeds Young’s work ethic comes from a sense of purpose and devotion to something bigger than herself.

“What I found was at the end of the day, Kara’s ultimate commitment was to things that were greater than herself,” Levingston said. “That is the people in the room, that’s her sense of community, that’s also her devotion to an audience, that’s her own sense of spiritual connection to the art of performing. All those things come before her ego, so much that sometimes you have to be like, ‘You are also amazing by yourself.’”

Makeup by Starr Simpson