Born to Belizean parents in Harlem, the first-generation American actress has been nominated for a Tony Award, which recognizes excellence on the Broadway stage.
By Khaila Gentle
BELIZE CITY, Mon. May 30, 2022
American actress Kara Young, born to two Belizean parents, has been nominated for a Tony Award in the category of Best Featured Actress in a Play for her role in the Broadway show Clyde’s. Young acted alongside Emmy Award winners Uzo Aduba from Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, Ron Cephas Jones from shows This is Us and Luke Cage as well as actors Edmund Donovan and Reza Salazar.
Clyde’s, written by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage, is about a truck stop sandwich shop that offers its formerly incarcerated kitchen staff a shot at redemption.
“Even as the shop’s callous owner tries to keep them under her thumb, the staff members are given purpose and permission to dream by their shared quest to create the perfect sandwich,” states a synopsis of the play.
Prior to her Broadway debut, Kara Young played a wide-range of roles, including “an aspiring poet in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s ‘Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven’,” a white gay couple’s troubled daughter in Jeff Augustin’s “The New Englanders,” or a lesbian teen crushing on a certain screen star in C.A. Johnson’s “All the Natalie Portmans”, according to the New York Times‘ Elisabeth Vincentelli.
In Clyde’s, Young plays the role of Letitia, a young mother who had been imprisoned for stealing medication for her sick daughter.
Kara appeared on Color Blind Multimedia’s Dialogue with the Diaspora back in 2020, where she spoke about her heritage and her experiences navigating America as a black, Caribbean woman.
“There’s so much pride being a Caribbean woman, being a Belizean woman, you know; my grandfather is one of the pioneers, I believe, in technology in Belize, David Jenkins, and the fact that he made television available to poor people at one point in Belize is such a huge part of my existence, because I am now in this industry, and I feel like that’s sort of an intrinsic thing I carry with me,” she said.
Jenkins, who was also a photographer for AMANDALA, was an electrical engineer who for a one-time fee unscrambled television signals for poor Belizeans when access was limited to “pay per view” schemes. It has been said that Jenkins opened access to televison, which had once only been available to the wealthy.
Born and raised in New York City, Kara Young briefly attended Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, after which she went to the City College in New York and then the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts.
Shortly after her Broadway debut, Young began work on Amazon Prime Video’s I’m a Virgo, created by Boots Riley, who also wrote and directed the 2018 satirical comedy movie Sorry to Bother You.
In her 2020 interview with Color Blind, Young had this to say to Belizeans both creative and otherwise:
“Express, express, express—be creative, even if you’re not a creative. Attempt to be creative, because it’s something that comes from you. It’s not in a book. It’s from you, and it’s important, and it’s intrinsic, and it’s ancestral,” she stated.