Kara Young Makes Tony Award History And Finds ‘Purpose’ In Broadway

Before she sets foot in Radio City Music Hall this Sunday, actor Kara Young will have already made Tony Award history by becoming the first Black person to receive Tony acting nominations in four consecutive years, and only the second person overall. If she wins this Sunday, she will be the first Black person to win two consecutive Tonys.

And yet, the records don’t do Kara Young justice. The treasure is in each performance, one as different, complex and unfailingly compelling. In Lynn Nottage’ Clyde’s (2022) she played a former criminal who finds redemption as, of all things, a cook in a truck stop diner. The following season in Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living, she played Jess, a broke young woman who becomes a caregiver to a young man with cerebral palsy; and in 2024 she received a Tony Award for her featured role as Lutiebell Gussie Mae Jenkins in Ossie Davis dark civil rights comedy Purlie Victorious.

This season she is giving yet another nominated gem of a performance in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play as Aziza, a young New York lesbian who, during the Covid lockdown, has become friends with her safe-distance (and asexual) neighbor Naz (John Michael Hill). For reasons that would take considerable time unraveling, Aziza ends up going along with Naz to the young man’s childhood home in Chicago, where she is star-struck (and surprised) to discover that Naz’s family, the Jaspers, are America’s most prominent Civil Rights leaders, though as we discover throughout the play, prominence doesn’t preclude moral failure, disappointments, even crime. (The Jaspers bear a more than small resemblance to the Jesse Jackson family.)

Deadline talked to Young about these and other issues. We wondered what accounts for her non-stop schedule, her drive? She soon be seen in the film adaptation of Aleshea Harris’ play Is God Is, and next year she returns to the stage in a major Off Broadway play – a revival of Whoopi Goldberg’s The Goldberg Monologues at Lincoln Center Theater. (That production was announced after this interview was conducted.)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Purpose is written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play and directed Plylicia Rashad and stars LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix, Jon Michael Hill, Glenn Davis, Alana Arenas, Kara Young. Purpose, nominated for six Tony Awards, including Best Play and, for Young, Best Featured Actress in a Play. Purpose was recently extended eight weeks and now runs through August 31 at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

DEADLINE: Good lord, Kara! Four times in a row.

KARA YOUNG: Thank you. Thank you. It’s so insane I can’t even believe it.

DEADLINE: You’re one of two people in the world, along with Laurie Metcalf, who can answer this question: Does it get any easier or does it change in some way after four consecutive times being nominated for a Tony Award.

YOUNG: I have no idea. You know, it’s interesting, it doesn’t feel…doing the work of the theater, it feels like whether it’s Broadway or Off Broadway or Off Off Broadway…You know, my community they’re still here. They’re still supporting and it doesn’t feel so different than when I was doing All the Natalie Portmans at MCC, you know, by CA Johnson, directed by Kate Whoriskey.

It doesn’t feel any different than when I was doing Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven. It doesn’t feel any different than Jeff Augustine’s New Englanders or Syncing Ink by Nsangou Njikam. It just feels like the work, and I guess the thing that probably does get more challenging is really like the pursuit to be a better artist, right? You know, the challenge of wanting to extend and expand and to work harder.

DEADLINE: But doesn’t Broadway has a sort of aura around it, or is that an outsider’s perspective?

YOUNG: I think other people probably see it a lot differently than me. Like my immediate family sees it way differently than I do, and my people I grew up with see it a little differently than I do. And also I’ve been going from project to project to project, so I’ve just been working. I love this so much. I just love being a storyteller so much and I know that sounds corny sometimes but I just love it.

DEADLINE: That was another question I was wanting to ask, four play, four Broadway productions in four years, is that by design or is it the kind of thing where you do one show and you get offered another job and then offered another job and then it’s like okay take these while they’re here, while they’re offered to you. Or do you actually plan to be that busy?

YOUNG: Maybe it’s a little bit of both because if there’s like a few days where I’m not working or not in a reading or workshop or going to see a show, I do feel like a little out of sorts, you know. I actually do.

DEADLINE: You’re the first Black actress or maybe even the first Black performer to have four consecutive nominations. I know you feel joy, but does it make you feel anxious in any way, like carrying a responsibility? You’ll have to tell me because you are the only person in the world who can answer that question.

YOUNG: Well, you know, there is a great responsibility because of visibility and I am understanding of that part. I’m a representative. I’m not like a political representative in my community but I’m a representative of Harlem. I feel like that I have to represent. So, I do think that there comes a responsibility for being visible in this world rather, in this theater community. So, yes, I do feel that at times just in regards to all the appearances and all the things that are required that are actually not a part of doing the stage work, but it’s a different kind of work.

DEADLINE: Tell me about the cast of Purpose.

YOUNG: Let’s start with [director] Miss Rashad, the incredible Miss Rashad. I say that she is the epitome of grace and such a master of the theater and the way that she is in the world. She is ever evolving.

Alana Arenas, she’s making the most epic Broadway debut. She really is. I’m always in awe of her every single night. We have that epic dinner scene and I have to remind myself that I’m in a play watching her because I am like caught up in what she is doing as an actor, she just has some of the most beautiful, explosive language in the play, and the way that Branden [Jacobs-Jenkins, the playwright] has set it all up is really quite special because we don’t hear from Alana’s character until that time.

DEADLINE: I heard a lot of people in the audience flipping through the Playbills trying to figure out who this woman is giving this incredible performance. Many of us here don’t know her – she’s a Chicago actor.

YOUNG: She’s been on the Chicago stages for a hot minute. She’s been in this business for a really long time but she also was in Head of Passage by Tarell Alvin McCraney and at the Public Theatre with Miss Rashad some years back. But Alana Arenas is known now because of this epic Broadway debut.

And Glen Davis, he’s quite remarkable as a human being and as an actor because he is holding two hats so beautifully as co-artistic director of Steppenwolf, which this is a Steppenwolf production in New York, and also remaining an incredible journey of a character who is suffering from a lot. His Junior is just now rehabilitating himself into his society after being incarcerated for two years or 21 months and his is quite the journey that is heartbreaking. You know there’s something that happens in the play that we are shocked by and it’s wonderful to watch him every single night.

Jon Michael Hill, who plays Nazareth Jasper, aka Naz, he is one of the most generous actors that I have ever met. He masterfully traverses between two worlds as our narrator and also jumping into the memory, jumping into scenes with us, and he does it with such preciseness. He’s one of the hardest working people I’ve actually ever witnessed, and he gets to the theater really early.

Harry Lennix, Harry Lennix. Harry Lennix is somebody whose face we know from growing up and who we’ve seen in everything. You know, Harry Lennix’s career is beautiful and remarkable, and he’s given us these iconic movies, like The Five Heartbeats, and every time I listen to his voice it feels like home. It feels like home. He has such a distinct voice like that of James Earl Jones. So, him being on stage with me I am captivated by not only witnessing him as the actor but also trying to pinch myself that I’m acting alongside with him.

And LaTonya Richardson Jackson, who is our matriarch, is our Claudine Jasper. She’s also very much the matriarch of our community, you know, of us, of our company and she keeps us on our toes. I have never seen someone so massively dive into nuance. I call her the queen of nuance. The way that she listens, the way that I watch her listening. She does these things that surprise me every single night, which is why we’re all on our toes. I tell her all the time like you are the inspiration. She is the inspiration.

DEADLINE: It’s nice when your heroes match up in real life, isn’t it?

YOUNG: Oh my goodness yes indeed, indeed. You ask me before if I’ve been taking everything in that’s been happening. When I get time to sit down and absorb all of the heroes that I have had the honor of working with, like I’m about to get emotional because I think about being back in the the Helen Hayes Theatre where Clydes happened. Ron Cephas Jones was in Clydes. He played the incredible Montrellous in Lynn Nottage’s Clydes directed by Kate Whiorskey and it was his last play. He’s such a hero, such a hero to me.

DEADLINE: You both were so good in that.

YOUNG: I always hear stories of his performance in Stephen Adly Gurgis’ Jesus Hopped the A Train. I know how hard that man had worked in his life for him to get the opportunities later in his career to be able to be on television and in This Is Us.

You know, he was working for so long doing all the plays, doing all the plays. He was an encyclopedia. Like he taught me about playwrights I never heard of. It just made me think about the legacy of the people that I’m working with and the honor to work with these people and the fact I have gotten the chance to spend time with them in this way. You know, I always think about when that ghost light goes on at the end of the night and when we transition will we return to the stages and replay the plays in our minds, you know, be the ghost in the theater that are just playing in the plays.

DEADLINE: That’s lovely. One last thing and then I’ll let you go. In an earlier conversation we spoke about the Jesse Jackson connection to the family in Purpose. Is that background or history something you talk about as cast members?

YOUNG: So, like, I have very pseudo knowledge about the…obviously I know who Jesse Jackson is and I know Jesse Jackson’s legacy but I had very little knowledge about Jesse Jackson’s personal life, and I know that the play is loosely based off of the legacy of Jesse Jackson and his family, but it’s more just a dynamic of what it means to be in a legacy family, and I think that from my knowledge I can seem that there are a few plot points that might be in relation o the Jackson Family story but I believe that Brandon has created a world with respect, with the utmost respect, for the humanness of the characters.

DEADLINE: For the humanness of the Jesse Jackson family too.

YOUNG: For the humanness of them too. Absolutely. Absolutely. You’re right.

DEADLINE: You have a new movie coming up. Tell me about it.

YOUNG: It’s called Is God Is by Aleshea Harris, directed by Aleshea Harris for the film. Aleshea Harris is making her directorial debut. She adapted her play into a screenplay, which I had got the fortunate experience to have seen it in 2018 at SoHo Rep and I was totally mind blown when I saw it and I auditioned for it and I can’t believe that I am going to be in this movie with an incredible cast.

I mean we’re talking about Greek tragedy meets western meets the great road trip movie meets the revenge story.

It’s also a love story between two sisters, or between twins rather, and the visionary that Aleshea Harris is and the precise vision and artistic vision that she has as a director I think is going to be a really beautiful experience, a visceral visual experience for people.