Kara Young Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

Kara Young is the rare contemporary stage actor whose career—the way it is discussed, awarded, and continuously contracted—approaches that of a fifties studio star. She wraps up her eleventh theater credit in six years this weekend, days after her first leading feature film, Is God Is, hits streaming services, and it’s not even close to the conclusion of a run that has amassed four Tony Award nominations (including two wins), universal goodwill, and the accompanying pomp of press, galas, and ceremonies. Her next project, Dominique Morisseau’s Mix and Master, opens on Broadway in January, and when I ask if she’ll finally take some time off before rehearsals begin, she, of course, replies that she has “a commitment for something else, but I think I’m going to take a little bit of time—maybe. I don’t know. I just got something yesterday…”

With the breadth and cachet of plays Young has been involved in, it’s easy to see how each one might drive the actor to keep the party going. This latest one is a clear midsummer dream, an off-Broadway production of The Whoopi Monologues, the 1983 stage show that thrust Whoopi Goldberg into stardom. Dreamt up by Kerry Washington and directed by Whitney White, the revival spread five of its originator’s speeches across five performers, including Washington. Young says the piece’s 1985 HBO recording blew her mind after a teacher suggested it to her several years ago, and the character of Fontaine, a philosophizing Harlem ex-junkie and one of Goldberg’s best-known creations, was assigned to Young by the legendary entertainer herself. The actor says Goldberg trusted her not only with the casting but also the production with freedom of interpretation.

“Whoopi was very hands-off, actually, and gave the reins to Kerry’s vision of remounting the monologues, and Whitney putting it all together,” says Young. “She didn’t want to be prescriptive, and it was the first time she’d ever heard anybody speak her words. It’s been forty years since this has been on Broadway, and she’s never heard anybody else do it. That was really nerve-racking to me.”

Still, the character is one the Harlem-born Young recognizes deeply, and she found comfort in sharing her New York hometown with Goldberg, Washington, and co-stars Dominique Fishback and Kecia Lewis. (Danielle Pinnock, born in Boston, rounded out a cast that later came to include another New Yorker, Jurnee Smollett, when Washington departed for another commitment.) “There’s so many Fontaines in the streets in New York City, so it’s not something that feels far away from us in any capacity,” Young says. “There are a few people in my life that I can really tap into there.”

The 299-seat Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, a smaller house on Lincoln Center’s campus, also gave Young a new ability to “take a few liberties here and there” with audience interaction. On such an intimate thrust stage, “it’s hard to ignore what’s going on. So if there’s a cell phone that goes off…” There was never a phone-snatching moment, but the actor winks at the spotlit fate of a few late-comers and interruptors. The Whoopi Monologues was also Young’s first time working on a production with director Whitney White, with whom she’d previously only done a workshop (“or two, question mark”). The similarly uber-booked writer, director, and performer, she says, “has an incredible ability to make people feel seen and understood, and is just in all avenues of everything,” including Boots Riley’s writing room for his 2023 series, I’m a Virgo, in which Young starred.

It was at that series’ South by Southwest premiere that Young first noticed the gap between stage and screen, both in terms of audience reaction and creation: “a disconnect between what visibility is, but not in the sense of delayed gratification, just a different kind of connection to the work.” The experience of storytelling onstage, she says, “feels very ancestral,” whereas screens enhance devices like sound design and cinematography that don’t feature as viscerally with a theatrical audience. Is God Is presents a curious new frontier. Aleshea Harris’s film adaptation of her own 2018 play is a searing revenge odyssey that creates instant wounds, leaving some to heal and others to scar. Along with Riley’s I Love Boosters, which was released around the same time and features an unforgettable cameo from Young, both movies received universal acclaim but didn’t make much of a dent in sales or summer film discourse.

“Now that they’re streaming, it’s going to have more viewership and accessibility to people, so there’s that,” notes Young. “It’s just a different beast. You do the thing, and then, not that you ever forget about it, but it takes a while to be put out in the world. And then they come up with a release date, and you see what the numbers are doing and how many theaters it might be in and the quote-unquote projections of a successful movie.”

“It feels like such an important piece of art and an important marker in cinema history,” she continues. “What Aleshea has given us will probably be compared to other pieces of work, but it feels like such an important marker in cinema history. And Boots is always giving us new innovative ways to think. The imagination is so expansive for both of these filmmakers, but the movie industry is a very interesting one.”

Young says that each time she’s seen it with an audience, it’s made an undeniable impression, but hopes that it might be better appreciated on multiple viewings. “There’s this feeling where, because the work is so grand and so specific, if it goes over people’s heads, it means either you got to watch it again, or pick up the play and read it. Ask the questions that you have, because they start to unlock something in the experience.”

Beyond reuniting with Harris and Riley, she says she’s keen to work with Mariama Diallo, with whom she shot Master and Hair Wolf, or collaborate with directors Shaka King and Mekhai Lee. In terms of a smaller screen, with possibly the widest impact, there’s one particular musician in whose video she hopes to one day star: “I flew to London for three days just to see Kendrick Lamar, that’s how deep it goes. I want to meet him so badly, I have dreams of working with this man in some capacity.”

All of these projects, and all the interviews surrounding them, have given Young the ability to learn from the greats, be they contemporary (like Lynn Nottage, for whose play Clyde’s Young earned her first Tony nomination) or legendary (like her first win, via Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious). But what about the person connecting them all, the one so often on the mic? She says, “What I’ve learned is that I have so many people that I’m inspired by, “maybe I need to think deeper about things that are being asked of me.”

“My mom tells me this often, that I don’t like to talk about myself, and I’ve noticed that too,” continues Young. “But then in retrospect, I haven’t really sat to absorb, What am I actually learning about myself? I feel more about the expansion of self in regards to being an artist; what I’m tapping into or what I’m exploring, today versus yesterday. If I were to look at any article that was written years ago, I wonder what I would be saying about those characters I had the opportunity to step into, how things have changed in regards to how I speak about the character, and also our character, and how the work has deepened? I wonder about that, now I’m curious.”

The Whoopi Monologues continues through Sunday at Lincoln Center Theater, New York.