New York – Don’t bother to ask Kara Young which of her roles is her favorite. All are their favorite.
“Every time I do a show, I feel it is the most important thing on the planet,” she says. “I don’t have a favorite. It’s like this: Everyone, every project has had its own weight.”
At this time, the heavy project in his mind is the famous “purpose” of Broadway, the drama of the drawing hall of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at the Helen Hayes theater on a consummated black family that reveals his hypocrisy and failures during a snowy meeting.
“There is a lot in this play,” says Young, who plays a stranger who witnesses implosion. “Like many of the great writers, create these universes in a line or the space between words.”
“Purpose” is in the living room of the Jasper family in a upper middle class neighborhood in Chicago. The patriarch is the Pastor Solomon Jasper, a legend of civil rights, and his staunch wife, Claudine.
They are meeting with their two children: Junior, a former dishonorous state senator, recently released after complying with a prison sentence for fund embezzlement, and Naz, who fled the Divinity School and is now a nature photographer.
Young plays Aziza, a social worker raised in Harlem who has been a close friend of Naz but knew nothing about his family. “This kind of thing never happens to me! I never know famous people and have you been famous for all this time?” She shouts.
His astonishment quickly fades when the brothers jealousy, the frustrations of the parents, the past sins and the pressures of the legacy come out of a tense dinner. There are some slaps.
“We are very susceptible to anger with the people we love most,” says Young. “What we are seeing in less than 12 hours of being together for the first time in two years, are sitting and having dinner, and all these things arise, as they often do.”
Young’s work has won a Tony prize nomination and the opportunity to make history. Already the first black person to be nominated four times consecutively, if he wins, he will be the first black interpreter to win two tonys in a row.
Young made his Broadway debut in 2021 in “Clyde’s”, he was in “Cost of Living” the following year and co -starred in front of Leslie Odom Jr. in “Purlie Victorios: not confederate through the cotton patch”, winning a barrel.
Jacobs-Jenkins calls Aziz in his script as a “deeply perceptual and empathic person” and who could also apply to young people, says he identifies closely with his character with “purpose”, both are defenders raised in Harlem for others, hoping to improve the planet.
“I feel connected to that core,” says Young. “Every work that I have done from my 10 -minute game festivals, I always like, ‘Wow, this seems that this can change the world,’ Do you know? And I feel that in the center of Aziza, this is how it feels. He wants to change the world.”
“Purpose”, directed by Phylicia Rashad, is also starring Latanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix, Jon Michael Hill, Arenas Arenas and Glenn Davis.
Hill, who as Naz also obtained a nomination of Tony for the best main male actor in a play, calls the young “the heart and joy of our little family there in Helen Hayes.”
“She enters the building and is only long for everyone and is really excited to see people and listen to how they are,” he says. “I have really never seen anyone have so much space in their conscience and their being for everyone who finds. He approaches every day with joy, curiosity and enthusiasm.”
If there is a story that shows who is Young, it would be the day of the With gala, that she and the members of the “purpose” cast were invited, along with their playwright. That same day, Jacobs-Jenkins won the Pulitzer Award for the drama.
Young learned as he made his makeup and started screaming. When he reached the gala, a similar moment, if there was ever one, it was an ad on foot for the work. “I told everyone: ‘You have to come to see this work. He just won a Pulitzer!'”
Hill was just behind her and smiling when Young made connections and presentations. “She was just going to everyone and introducing us and talking about our program and trying to put people at the door.”
Young made his debut on the 2016 stage in the work of Patricia Ione Lloyd “Pretty Hunger” in the public theater, a work about a 7 -year -old black girl who did not know she was black. The playwright told him that he wrote it with Young in mind.
“Ione Lloyd is one of the people who really made me see me as an artist,” she says. “She is the one who made me a path in a really beautiful way.”
The following for Young is the movie “Is God is”, which playwright Alesshea Harris directs from his own play of 2018. Sterling K. Brown, Vivica A. Fox and Janelle Monáe are in the cast. Young calls it “a western spaghetti-meets-tarin-finds: the Greeks.” Next summer in Broadway, he will star in a resurgence of “The Whoopi Monologues” against Kerry Washington.
After that, who knows? “I don’t know what follows, but I can’t wait, whatever it is,” she says. “If something appears, it’s about jumping to the following. If there is life in me, I have to live it.”
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