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Kara Young (actress)

Kara Young is an American actress. She has received three nominations for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play: in 2022 for the role of Letitia in Clyde's, in 2023 for the role of Jess in Cost of Living, and in 2024 for the role of Lutiebell Gussie Mae Jenkins in Purlie Victorious.

Early life and education

Young was born and raised in Harlem in New York City. Both of her parents emigrated from Belize. Her father, Klay Young, began working in the Rainbow Room in 30 Rockefeller Plaza in 1992 as a server and later captain (a place where Kara would eventually attend a special event for Tony Award nominees). Her mother worked in health administration in Bellevue Hospital.

Young had an interest in performing from the age of five, when she learned to mime in an afterschool program at the 92nd Street Y. She briefly went to Gettysburg College and the City College of New York before studying at the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, where she graduated. She studied traditional theater in Thailand for a month in 2008.

Career

Young joined the LAByrinth Theater Company in 2017. She has appeared off-Broadway in plays such as NSangou Njikam's Syncing Ink, Jonathan Payne's The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll'd, Stephen Adly Guirgis's Halfway Bitches Go Straight To Heaven (a LAByrinth co-production), Jeff Augustin's The New Englanders, and C.A. Johnson's All the Natalie Portmans. A Times review of her starring role in All the Natalie Portmans wrote that Young "can fit what feels like a mountain of blood, heart, sinew and febrile emotional response into a frame that can't stretch past five feet". Young often plays characters much younger than herself, adolescents or even preadolescents, something attributed in part to her small size and wide-set eyes.

In November 2021, Young made her Broadway debut at the Hayes Theater playing a single mother, Letitia, in Lynn Nottage's play Clyde's. The Times called her performance "superb". At the 75th Tony Awards, she was nominated for Best Featured Actress in a Play for Clyde's.

In 2022, Young played a caregiver, Jess, in Martyna Majok's play Cost of Living at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway. At the 76th Tony Awards, she was again nominated for Best Featured Actress in a Play for Cost of Living. In 2023 she portrayed Lutiebell Gussie Mae Jenkins in the revival of the Ossie Davis play Purlie Victorious on Broadway, for which she received a third Tony Award nomination.