Kara Young on 'Giving Voice to Characters Who've Been Silenced' in Broadway's “Purlie Victorious” (Exclusive)

Tony nominee Kara Young tells PEOPLE about the play’s all-star producing team and costar Leslie Odom Jr.

With three back-to-back Broadway gigs, Kara Young is bringing her all to, as she puts it, “work that is about giving somebody's heart a revolution.”

“I always want to be a part of work that feels like it's about giving voice to characters who've been silenced,” says the Harlem-born actress, who earned Tony nominations for featured actress in a play for Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s in 2022 and Martyna Majok's Cost of Living in 2023.

Young tells PEOPLE, “It's important to be in a theater for more than an hour and a half and hear Black women, Black people, Black non-binary people, Black men speak."

Her mission statement as a performer: “To do art that is shifting consciousness in humanity.”

Related: Tony Awards 2023: See the Complete List of Winners

Take the rising star’s latest turn in Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch, now playing at the Music Box Theatre, the first Broadway revival of the play since the legendary actor-activist Ossie Davis wrote it back in 1961. 

Centered on a preacher (Leslie Odom Jr.) returning to his small Georgia hometown to win back the family inheritance from a bigoted plantation owner, it’s a laugh-out-loud farce, complete with pratfalls, mistaken identities and knowing winks to an audience not used to seeing the American history of racism depicted with such comedy.

“This is a revolutionary Black play,” Young says. With ideas that prove relevant in both 1961 and 2023, she says, Davis “dissects the absurdity of racial and social structures in America and also touches upon the hard legacy of slavery.”

Related: Leslie Odom Jr. Eats the ‘Same Thing’ During a Broadway Run: ‘I Don’t Want to Mess Up the Rhythm’ (Exclusive)

As with the formerly incarcerated mom Letitia in Clyde’s, and aid worker Jess in Cost of Living, the actress steals the show in Purlie Victorious by showcasing what resilience looks like within that legacy.

Young plays the determined Lutiebell Gussie Mae Jenkins, a "woman who’s raised herself,” she says, who agrees to Purlie’s scheme to pretend to be his deceased cousin and trick Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee (Jay O. Sanders) into giving back the $500 he owes Purlie’s family. 

The absurdity of the ruse — which includes Lutiebell standing barely upright in heels, struggling to recite what she and Purlie rehearsed — mirrors the absurdity of so-called American values, Young says.

“Racism is a construct,” the I’m a Virgo star says. “And it's such a construct, people!”

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Young says audiences today need that reminder just as they did in the mid-20th century: “Now seems to be such a potent time in global history, let alone American history. The last eight years have been so interesting in the way things have been shifting in our general consciousness, and it seems to be that we're in the dark ages of ignorance.”

Case in point: “There are books being burned in our country. Our history is being buried. And what better time right now to revive this play, resurrect this play and activate Ossie Davis' words? Specifically a person who was absorbing the world around him. Ossie Davis and [his wife] Ruby Dee were literal political pioneers while being Black artists.”

It’s why she jumped at the chance to deliver those words for director Kenny Leon and alongside Odom Jr., who Young says “has been such a gift” as both costar and executive producer. “It feels like how he's moving in the world, it makes the impossible seem so possible and he's doing it with so much grace.”

Meeting the production’s all-star team of producers — including Samuel L. Jackson, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Phylicia Rashad and Kerry Washington — has also been a gift, Young says.

After seeing the show, producer Alan Alda, who starred in the 1961 Broadway production opposite Davis as Purlie and Dee as Lutiebelle, told the cast he could feel the presence of his late costars.

“They're such humans and they're so warm and they're so loving,” says Young of the producing team. “Sometimes you just gotta pinch yourself because … you kind of feel like you know these people so well when you see them, you're like, ‘Auntie? Uncle? Huh?’ ”

For Young, stepping further into Broadway’s spotlight has meant rubbing elbows with the artists who most inspire her — including one A-lister in particular.

“My body went into some kind of ‘Oh my God’ because seeing Whoopi Goldberg was like everything to me,” she remembers with a grin. “She's like my one. This is a woman who's done everything.”

Related: Whoopi Goldberg's Most Iconic Film & TV Roles Through the Years

Goldberg, she explains, “has given us so many different faces and masks. I can go down the list: She's given us The Color Purple. She's given us Sister Act. She's given us Ghost. She's given us everything. We've laughed, we've cried. … I feel she's just one of those people that is the definition of, ‘You can't put me into a box.’ ”

Purlie Victorious ends its Broadway run in February. Tickets are available online.

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