Kara Young has already made history. The star of Purpose is currently nominated for Best Featured Actress in a Play at the Tonys for the fourth consecutive time, after winning the award for Purlie Victorious last year. She’s the first Black person to be nominated four times consecutively and, after Laurie Metcalf (nominated from 2016–19, winning twice), only the second performer ever. If she wins, she’ll be the first Black performer to win two Tonys in a row. Making it all the more remarkable is that this is just her fourth Broadway show. Yes, she’s been in four consecutive Broadway shows, and she’s gotten nominated for a Tony for all of them. Her rise has been meteoric. With the exception of a standout performance in Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo, she’s built that reputation entirely in the theater. In just a few years, she’s gone from unknown to 2025 Met Gala attendee. In the speed of her success, she’s near-peerless.

Onstage, Young stays down to earth, though. In both Purlie and now the Pulitzer Prize–winning Purpose, she plays lower-class interlopers confronting higher-class situations. In Purlie, originally written in 1961 by Ossie Davis, she was the lovably illiterate Lutiebelle Gussie May Jenkins who gets married to Preacher Purlie (Leslie Odom Jr.) in the Reconstruction-era South. Purpose brings her into the modern day. In Purpose, she plays Aziza, a queer woman who asks her asexual friend Naz (Jon Michael Hill) to artificially inseminate her. She then drives him to his family event, where she gets stuck due to a snow storm, only to learn that Naz’s father, Sonny (Harry Lennix), is an iconic civil-rights activist and his brother Junior (Glenn Davis) is a disgraced senator who just got out of prison. Hilarity and high drama, particularly between Aziza and Naz’s mother, Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), ensues. Young is currently performing the show while in the midst of actively campaigning for the Tonys — we chat in the break she has between introducing Buena Vista Social Club at Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Ham4Ham and performing her show — but, four years in, she knows how to be a nominee.

Is your Tony-season schedule out of control? 
It feels that way, but I’m grateful to just be continuing to do the work. When you’re part of the theater community in New York City, you’re running from a reading to a performance, and, if you’re not performing, you’re going to see a show. Your brain is trained to be 17 different people in a week by the hustle and bustle of it.

The play won the Pulitzer Prize on the same day as the Met Gala. What did that feel like? 
I screamed when I found out that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won the Pulitzer in the hotel that I was getting ready in. My makeup was getting done. I called him immediately. I called my mom.

Walking into the Met, I was like, Branden won the Pulitzer. I’m just here to have a good old time. And Branden won the Pulitzer. It was about telling people about the play and making sure that they came to see it. I was promoting the play all night.

This is the fourth year in a row that you’ve been nominated, but it’s the first time you’re running the production as you’re doing Tony promotion, since the others closed prior to nominations coming out. How are you approaching this?
I just want to tell people about this play. I want to tell people about the Pulitzer Prize–winning Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play directed by Phylicia Rashad starring LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix, Alana Arenas, Glenn Davis, and Jon Michael Hill, and myself.

Has your approach to awards season changed over the years?
It’s a great opportunity. What better time to be out in the streets, in our community and making sure that people come to see the show?

What’s your relationship like with institutional success? 
When I talk to my family outside of the world of the theater world, they see something different than what I’m experiencing. I feel that the foundation of all of this is the theater community. I know that it’s been four years on Broadway, but I still see the same people outside that were at my Off Broadway shows like All the Natalie Portmans. That’s grounding because I am constantly with my peers.

Do the Tonys feel like your community?
Yeah. Saheem Ali directed me in Jeff Augustin’s The New Englanders pre-COVID pandemic, and sound designer Palmer Hefferan was on that project as well. Now they’re both nominated for Tony Awards, and we’re going to be there together. Whitney White was nominated for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding last year, and that’s like my sister. How do I feel about institutions? I don’t necessarily feel it.

Do you feel your success? 
No, I don’t think like that.

Have you had time to process your success? 
I haven’t taken the moment to really sink in what the past four years have been. I’ve been going from project to project. Being invited to that Met Gala was such an iconic moment for the barriers that it was breaking. This is a moment that Black designers will never forget — this homage to Black culture, Black fashion, Black roots, and the revolutionary act of what it means to feel joyous inside.

How did you feel posing on the carpet?
You can feel when a garment feels great. I know it’s to be seen and it’s to be photographed and judged, but it felt good for my own spirit.

I want to talk about Aziza. What was your entry point into her?
She’s born and raised in Harlem, like me. I went to a very hippie elementary school. I know this girl. I know her very well.

What do you find aspirational about her?
She is who I want to be or somebody who I could have been. She makes this decision to bring life into the world right after a very traumatic moment in our time’s history that she had that she had to go through. Bringing life is her purpose.

Harry Lennix and I had conversations around the immaculate conception of the prospective child — Naz gets to a certain moment in his life in order to provide the seed, and it is honoring God’s majesty in the most profound way. Aziza meticulously chose him to be the one to do that. Plus, she’s a queer woman. She’s standing up for her friend in this play. She’s a social worker, which I connect to. As an actor, when you get to do this kind of work with writers like Lynn Nottage and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, you feel like you are changing the world.

In Purlie Victorious and Purpose, you’ve played an outsider arriving in high society. Do they share any DNA with you?
I haven’t really thought about that. I think all the characters inform each other. Lutiebelle is entering like a fish out of water into a new place. Aziza is walking into a place blindly with curiosity with the intention of wanting to know more about her friend, but is met with a legacy family that is a part of her foundation and upbringing.

I don’t know if I’m necessarily drawn to certain kinds of roles. It’s not a choice. It feels very spiritual, and it sounds really cliché, but it feels like the thing is happening simultaneously with producers thinking about me for something and it coming at the right time. It’s all beyond me.

The roles just come to you. 
Does that sound weird? As soon as the next thing comes, it always feels like the thing. People will ask, “What is your favorite?,” and there’s no favorite because they all hold a separate weight in the journey. Right now Purpose is the purpose, and that’s all that I can think of.

At some point, do you think you’ll burn out? Do you need a break?
I’m sure that I do. But I just always bring it back to my ancestors. The reality is that they are infinite and I can only just strive to be as infinite as them, without pretension. If I’m still going then I have to still go. I love the work and I love writers and I love directors and I love being with the company of people. I have to honor that.

Do you ever lose sight of that?
I don’t know if there’s a sight and I don’t know if I’m losing it. I’m grateful to be alive and I’m grateful to live these baby-girl dreams. Not to sound eerie, but being I’m in the mode of We all have an appointment that we can’t miss, which is death, I want to live as fully as possible today because I don’t know what the next moment is.

Given that, for you, it seems that your career moves fall into place, I’m curious if you ever set hard-line goals for yourself?
I do think about things in the future. I’ve also not set out super-goals, but I do have things that I want to accomplish — things that I want to experience rather.

Like what?
More film and television work. I think that is a medium in which there’s so much to learn. It’s just a never-ending process of absorbing everything. I want to experience all the facets of being a storyteller.

I never expected to be in a fourth Broadway play. This is all a part of a plan that feels a little bit bigger than me. But yeah, I’m going to dream more. I promise. Next time we talk, I’m gonna be like, “Listen, I went on a vacation for three days,” and you’re going to be like, “Wow, okay, you’re going to need more than that.”

Related

• Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Finally Wins His First Pulitzer for Purpose
• A Storied Black Family Faces Itself in Purpose
• The 2025 Tony Nominations

 After four years of Tony nominations, a Met Gala red carpet, and performing in Pulitzer Prize winner Purpose, Kara Young is still going and going.