This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
Her starring role in “Purlie Victorious” seals Young’s fate as a proud New Yorker and Broadway baby.
Harlem native Kara Young may be physically diminutive (5 foot, 2 inches, if she sits up straight), but she commands the stage like a giant. When we connect for our interview, a radiant Young is still in previews as Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, opposite Leslie Odom Jr., in Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch — a biting, comedic Ossie Davis satire about Confederate racism (at the Music Box Theatre on West 45th Street in New York City). With two Tony nominations under her belt — one just last year for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play in Cost of Living, and a 2022 nomination in the same category for her role in Clyde’s — Young has proved herself to be an agile, commanding actor, capable of the physicality and commitment required to embody her characters from hair root-to-toenail.
Directed by Kenny Leon, the Tony Award-winning director of A Raisin in the Sun, Purlie Victorious is the first Broadway revival of this American comedy by Ossie Davis. The play originally premiered in 1961, three years before the Civil Rights Act was signed into law in the still-segregated South, with Davis as Purlie Victorious Judson (now played by Odom Jr.), a preacher without a pulpit determined to buy and integrate his local church. Young plays, nay, channels the role of Lutiebelle, the naive girl as beautiful as “10,000 Queens of Sheba.” Purlie plucks Lutiebelle from the Alabama kitchen she toils in to impersonate his late Cousin Bee and claim her rightful $500 inheritance from a white, abusive plantation owner named Cap’n Cotchipee, betting on the fact that he won’t be able to tell the two apart. She’s joined by an ally, Charley, Cotchipee’s son, and the rest of the plot unravels in a tale of love, community, and what a Black family does to hang onto both.
Young says she knew of Davis and Ruby Dee as Harlem civil rights pioneers and community organizers, but the Purlie Victorious book was new to her. “I had no idea that Ossie Davis wrote a play, let alone a satire like this,” she says with a smile. “I remember reading it on the page the first time and being like, ‘How? How are we going to do this?’ I also laughed a lot on the page. We did a workshop with Leslie, Heather [Alicia Simms, who plays Missy], and Vanessa Bell Calloway [who plays Idella Landy], and the activation of the words off the page with other voices filling the space, and not just in my brain, was magic.”
For so many reasons, Young feels this revival of Purlie Victorious could not come to Broadway at a better moment: “In the last seven to eight years, we saw how our nation was divided. We really understood where people stood, and that was a very loud voice in our ears,” Young explains. “There’s probably some sort of pseudo-understanding that people are still suffering from ignorance, and we all are in some kind of capacity, but I witnessed a video yesterday of these people burning books! It was like a freaking séance, people torching books! Even though it’s a period piece written at a certain time, it is a marker of our history that cannot be forgotten. This is why it’s so important to look at the hard legacy of slavery to understand the social and racial structures of this world.”
Leslie Odom, Jr. and Kara Young star in Purlie Victorious.
Marc J. Franklin
She continues, “I also think what Ossie does is really dissect the absurdities of racism and the fact that we still really, truly need each other. There’s this really beautiful line with old Cap’n Cotchipee being so aggressive to Idella, then being like, ‘Save some of those buttermilk pies!’ The way Ossie writes is like, I’m going to hit you with the raw s--it — excuse my French — then I’m going to show you how much I need you. So, I think what he’s writing is [that] we need each other so much that we’re losing the fact that we exist together, and our history is our history, and it sucks, but how do we move forward with what has happened? That’s why Ossie wrote the gospel to the unity of humanity. We need to be unified, human to human to human.”
Young is clearly honored to give life to Davis’ words: “The feeling of what it means to be a Black vessel and what it means for when for so long historically, even right now, our words are being silenced, our books are being burned, and our history is being diminished. To be a Black voice in a time where it’s an hour and a half, or hour and 40 minutes, for you to sit down and hear Black people speak by the great Ossie Davis ...” She shakes her head in reverence and smiles.
In her process of “becoming” Lutiebelle, Young carefully considers how every aspect of her life might feel. “Preparation is kind of about filling in the histories of who might have told her something when she was 5,” Young says. “How can I honor Lutiebelle in an hour and a half during a major discovery in the peak of her life thus far? What does a fish out of water feel like? Who is also so attracted to someone who might feel like this person is their soulmate? I’m still finding and still building [the character], but I’m really thinking about what does a Black woman’s freedom look like when she’s trying to find it? What does the act of pretending feel like?”
Young recalls a particular scene in which, as Lutiebelle, she impersonates Cousin Bee. “I know that’s like a very comedic moment in the play as written, but there’s something about Cousin Bee as a Black woman who has a chance at education, who is now transitioned, who could name her mother and her father and where she comes from,” she explains. “Lutiebelle comes from nobody. She doesn’t know who her mother and father are. She doesn’t know what her root name might be. Her compass is her own spiritual compass, finding her way in the world, raising herself, or by whoever happens to be in charge of the kitchen that day. Lutiebelle is on the grand mission of her life in a way because she takes a chance and says, I’m going to go with this man. I’m going to go with this man who dreams to be a preacher, and I love church, and I love being in these spaces where we can be free. She’s striving for a sense of spiritual freedom, but what does that look like physically? Does she remember that early on? Where was she left? Who first got her? What was her first boss? I think she takes a lot of pride in the fact that she is a maid first class.”
Kara Young is pictured at New World Center on June 17, 2023 in Miami Beach, Florida.
Mireya Acierto//Getty Images
This resonates with Young personally: “There’s beauty in domestic work. My grandmother and my great-grandmother, who is still alive and is 105, did domestic work, worked with her hands and on her feet. You know my father is a server at the Rainbow Room [a legendary landmark New York restaurant], and my father takes pride in his job. I find that beautiful.”
In Davis’ production, the role of Lutiebelle was originated by actress Ruby Dee, also from Harlem, who has proved to be something of a patron saint of Young. It’s almost as if the role were destined for her. “For years, people have been telling me that I remind them of Ruby Dee, which is kind of kismet and inexplicable — my aunt was manifesting this for me!” smiles Young. “So, even to feel her while doing it in the back of my head, I’m stepping into her shoes, and this foundation that she laid felt so, like, whoa to me.”
Also like Dee, Young is a devoted member of her community — she even ran for a community board at one point: “I know that sometimes the way they make information accessible to people in the community is slim to none. I was raised here, and I’ve seen so many changes here. When I grew up here, I was talking to everybody, saying, ‘Good morning, good afternoon, and good night,’ to every single person on the block, no matter what socioeconomic background they came from, no matter what their position in life was. There’s just so much to be done regarding building community and what it means to speak to your neighbors.”
Understandably, Young is deeply concerned about gentrification. “When I was growing up, there was a ritual every Father’s Day celebrating Black fatherhood — a basketball tournament,” the actor explains. “People would win trophies. It was so beautiful, and after the people moved into our community [of Harlem], they petitioned so it wasn’t there. To be a homeowner here, a lot of the requirements have changed. A lot of the HDFC housings have changed with regard to how much you’re making versus what you can afford, versus what you might be able to get in a loan. There are just so many different loopholes. It feels like violence — people are actually being pushed out.”
As a little kid, Young didn’t know she was going to be an actor per se, but looking back, her youthful inclinations left a trail of clues — the first, a mime class she took with her brother when she was 5. “This beautiful Israeli woman, Zahava Gratz, kind of took me under her wing at the 92nd Street YMCA, which was my after-school program at the time,” Young recalls. “She really cultivated an artist in me, and that’s where I feel like I found performance, building imaginary worlds through mime.” She describes the experience of performing in schools and nursing homes with other kids as the foundation of her love of acting.
Kara Young is shown during a photoshoot.
Kara Young
From there, she discovered the joys of musical theater but was quick to disqualify herself as a singer despite having earned solos, which is surprising considering the melodic, honeyed tone of her voice. As a teen, she performed with a group in El Barrio called Standing Ovation but didn’t immediately see her name in lights: “Your dreams sort of get sucked into a vault and then put away a little bit. As the journey took its course, those dreams were not really there. The dreams we have when we’re children are so important and are probably still lurking, and this, I guess, came into fruition.”
To make ends meet while auditioning and performing as a young adult, she juggled many flexible gigs at a time. “I was the brunch girl. I was a babysitter. I worked at a cigar bar. I worked at an office for years,” Young says. “On top of all of that, I would work at the office. Even though my boss would be like, ‘You can work three days a week,’ I ended up always being there five days a week. I would leave the office, and I would work at the cigar bar. After work Saturdays and Sundays, I would be working brunch after that. I don’t know how I did this, but I would schedule my rehearsals. For some reason, it always worked, and I was always able to get off when I needed to.”
When Young is asked about early influences, her first thought is Lucille Ball, which makes so much sense, given her gift for hilarious facial expressions. She also loves a sitcom, citing Frasier as a past and current fave. Other favorite comedic actors include David Hyde Pierce, Martin Lawrence, Marlon Wayans, and Kim Coles from Living Single. But naturally, her favorite set, stage, and character was, and still is, her native New York City: “Being a New Yorker and growing up around different kinds of people, whether it be on the subways or on the corners, and the characters that exist, there are sitcoms or dramas happening on every single corner.”