Young will start rehearsals for a starry Off Broadway revival of The Whoopi Monologues during the last few weeks of Proof’s run, at which point another theater stalwart, Adrienne Warren, will enter the show in her place. But ahead of that, the charismatic actor sat down with Vogue to discuss career coincidences, onscreen rage, and growing up in Harlem.
Vogue: With some two and a half weeks to find Claire, are you content with where you landed?
Kara Young: I’m never content in any process, to be very honest with you. I’m always looking to build more history and nuance and humanness. Claire’s been navigating this whole time being away from her family. There’s been an immense amount of financial sacrifice that she’s been working with to make sure that this family is taken care of. I’m going to continue to build until my last performance, which is always the case. There always could be more. How do I honor someone in the five scenes that we have? How do we actually make this person real and filled with all of their life in those few scenes?
How do you let go of screen performances?
It’s a really different thing to get over. We had our premiere at BAM the other night, and here are people that know you, some that don’t—a mixture of people, mostly of community, to some degree. That is a really tough thing, but at the same time, I remember the first time I watched it, I watched it by myself in a theater and I walked out and called my people, and they’re like, “What does it feel like to be leading a film?” And I said, “I have to be honest with you, I literally stopped watching myself, because it was about the story.” It was just so meticulously, artistically compounded into Aleshea’s vision, and every single shot is so intentionally done that the story took me on the journey. I forgot that I was in this film.
Are you usually more self-conscious watching yourself?
For sure! But I don’t think I’ve ever had this experience. I’ve led films, I’ve seen them in theaters, but I haven’t had this kind of experience where the play is now adapted into a film. I understand the journey a little bit differently, from seeing the play at Soho Rep in 2018 and being absolutely blown away by those performances and the story. The journey of it and knowing the weight and importance of this cult play Aleshea has given us, that has been produced all over the world and now it’s, like, in the vault…. Something about that is beyond me. Like, my performance is not even the thing, you know what I mean?
What is this story to you? It has so many myths and starts out kind of like The Odyssey, but then it’s not that. It bucks every expectation.
The story, to me, is about two young women who have navigated their world as survivors, as resilient people who grew up in the foster care system, having suffered a traumatic fire where their mother died. That’s what they know. They have made their world as joyous as it possibly can be, and they are okay together. Obviously the world comes at them very differently, but we exist together. We get a letter saying our mom is actually on her deathbed and to come visit her, so the journey is almost like a journey to know ourselves a little bit more. When we meet our mother, she tells us that our daddy tried to kill us and that her dying wish is for us to kill him. It’s about cutting the root of the pain. Is God Is is the most epic, Southern, Greek-odyssey-road-trip sisterhood of spirit. It’s about understanding the root of who we are and cutting it.
