NEW YORK:

Kara Young speaks about theatre with the conviction of someone who has seen it alter people in real time, not just entertain them.

Sitting inside the Booth Theatre hours before opening night of ‘Proof’, she frames the revival as something more immediate than nostalgia.

“For me, it’s about unlocking Black genius,” she says, adding that the casting reshapes the play’s emotional core into a meditation on grief, mental health and care.

Young, who has built a formidable Broadway reputation since 2021, describes stepping into Claire as an exercise in tension – a sister returning to a fractured household while carrying its financial weight from afar.

“You see the family dynamics very quickly,” she explains. “I haven’t been there, but I’ve been taking care of everything.” The result, she suggests, is a psychological reckoning with sacrifice and the quiet cost of devotion.

The revival, the first in 25 years, arrives at a moment she believes demands collective attention rather than passive consumption. “We’re becoming incredibly desensitised,” Young says.

“Theatre is one of the few spaces where people from completely different backgrounds sit together and feel something at the same time.” That shared experience, she argues, carries a rare potency in an increasingly fragmented world.

Her belief that performance can “change your brain chemistry” is not metaphorical. “Someone might hold on to a moment that shifts something inside them,” she says. “They walk out a different person.”

For Young, the transformation extends both ways – audience and actor bound in what she calls an “alchemy” of lighting, costume, text and human presence.

Beyond Broadway, she is preparing for the release of ‘Is God Is’, a film she first encountered as a play years ago. “It seeped into my psyche,” she recalls. “It’s wild, beautiful, dark – a love story between sisters but also something much bigger.” The project, she notes, occupies space rarely granted within mainstream cinema.

At the heart of her work lies a conscious engagement with representation. “I’m a Black vessel for the work,” she says plainly. “There’s an honour in telling stories that may not have been seen or heard.” Yet she resists flattening those narratives into a single identity. “We are not a monolith,” she adds.

Despite accolades, Young measures success differently. “There was a time I was working five jobs just to stay in theatre,” she says. “That felt just as meaningful.” What anchors her now is simpler. “Family is the secret sauce,” she says, describing an effort to remain rooted in ordinary routines, far from the glare of Broadway lights.