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USA Today
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Kara Young has found her 'Purpose.' Now she's making Tony Awards history.
Kara Young has found her 'Purpose.' Now she's making Tony Awards history. Show Caption Hide Caption Tony-winning 'Appropriate' playwright returns with 'Purpose' Kara Young, LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Harry Lennix star in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "Purpose," about an influential family with shocking secrets. NEW YORK — Kara Young makes any show a must-see event. In 2021, the ebullient newcomer made her Broadway debut in Lynn Nottage's 'Clyde's,' bringing spiky wit and desperation to a formerly incarcerated single mom. Since then, she's earned Tony Awards nominations for all four of her Broadway outings, winning best featured actress in a play for 'Purlie Victorious' last season. She's in the mix once again this year for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Purpose,' making history as the first Black performer to receive four consecutive Tony nods – and only the second person to do so overall. 'I actually cannot believe it,' Young says. 'I haven't truly understood or realized what has happened in the last four years.' Between her unremitting theater schedule, as well as her burgeoning film and TV career, she hasn't stopped long enough to sit down and take it all in. 'People have been saying, 'Just absorb what has happened,'' she says. 'I hope to have a moment to do that eventually. Right now, the work is the thing.' For Kara Young, 'Purpose' is the 'greatest challenge ever' On and off Broadway, Young has always been drawn to plays with political and social vibrations: exploring racism ('Purlie Victorious'), identity ('The New Englanders'), disability and caregiving ('The Cost of Living'). 'I am a Black person and what that represents in any story is bigger than myself,' says the actress, whose parents immigrated from Belize. 'I just feel incredibly grateful to work with some of the most amazing, prolific writers in our industry. Every single time I'm stepping into one of these worlds, I'm learning more about humanity.' 'Purpose' aligns with her ethos of wanting to tell stories that spark conversation. Directed by Phylicia Rashad, the nearly three-hour drama follows a prominent Black family, the Jaspers, with deep roots in the American civil rights movement. Younger son Naz (Jon Michael Hill) has agreed to be a sperm donor for his social worker friend, Aziza (Young), who stumbles into an explosive family dinner at his childhood home one weekend. At first filled with admiration for Naz's aging pastor patriarch (Harry Lennix), she is quickly exposed to the hypocrisy and threats that have propped up the Jaspers for decades. 'Aziza feels like someone who I've always wanted to be,' Young says. 'She is an unapologetically queer woman moving through the world and was raised to be a free person. There is no code-switching whenever she walks into a new space; she's incredibly respectful but she lives freely.' 'Purpose' is both uproarious and unsettling, forcing theatergoers to sit in their discomfort. Aziza is, in many ways, the audience surrogate, which requires Young to really be present with her venom-spewing costars as new lies and revelations are unfurled. Going in, 'I understood that it was going to be the greatest challenge ever,' Young says. 'It's almost like going back to the roots of acting, when an acting teacher tells you that the most important thing is listening. Aziza is walking into a space not as a fish out of water, but with an overwhelming curiosity of who her friend is. There are new things I hear and see every night – I'm always gagged. (Laughs.) That's the word, right?' Young is surrounded by an astounding, first-rate ensemble that includes Alana Arenas, LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Glenn Davis. But it's her quietly devastating performance that ultimately packs the biggest gut punch. 'Kara is an absolute star and always has been – and I mean that in a way that's almost classical at this point: inimitable, brilliant, elevating everything she touches, with chops for days,' Jacobs-Jenkins says. 'I'm both shocked and grateful Hollywood hasn't fully managed to rob us of her. She has remained so loyal to the stage – a true theatre animal – and we really should be so thankful for that. She's just such an obvious legend-in-the-making." How the Tony-winning Harlem native stays 'grounded' Young was born and raised in New York's Harlem neighborhood. Her parents, who worked in the healthcare and hospitality industries, never pushed her into extracurriculars. Rather, she discovered her love of performing at age 5, after tagging along to her brother's after-school mime class at the 92nd Street Y. As she got older, "I started doing musical theater in El Barrio with the Black and brown kids," Young recalls. "There was this beautiful woman, Liza Castro-Robinson, who would take all of the classic musicals and write a story around those songs.' (The actress downplays her singing abilities, but says she would still love to play Mrs. Lovett in "Sweeney Todd" or Roxie Hart in "Chicago.") Young has already begun to garner big- and small-screen attention: She starred in Prime Video series "I'm a Virgo" in 2023, and will next lead Aleshea Harris' film adaptation of "Is God Is" alongside Mallori Johnson, Sterling K. Brown, Vivica A. Fox and Janelle Monáe. She was "really shooketh" when Oprah Winfrey came to see "Purpose," and even more so when Whoopi Goldberg stopped by. ("There are people who have pure magic that lives inside of them, and that is Whoopi," she marvels.) But even with her rapid ascent, Young has never forgotten where she came from. "Purpose" is playing at the same theater where she did "Clyde's," and she has many fond memories of spending time backstage with the great Ron Cephas Jones, who died in 2023. ("He was such an epic man.") Young has the same dressing room as she did back then, where she keeps a portrait of her dear friend's late mom, Claudia Whittingham. ("Growing up, I always wanted to be her. I felt like she was my twin.") Family and community are what keep her centered amid all the chaos of this current Tony season. "Just calling my parents, even if it's for two seconds, like, 'Mom, I just want to hear your voice,' or 'Dad, tell me something great.' Even if I don't see him, I feel him,'' Young says, smiling. "New York keeps me grounded, too. I say hey to the dude on the corner selling random items, or the woman who might be asking for a little change. I hear my super every morning, and walk down and hug him. I've gotta stay feet planted in these streets." "Purpose" is now playing at the Hayes Theatre (240 W. 44th Street) through Aug. 31.
Forbes
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
What Time Are The 2025 Tony Awards Nominations? How To Watch
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 16: Sarah Paulson, winner of the "Lead Actress in a Play" award for ... More "Appropriate" poses in the 77th Annual Tony Awards Press Room at David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on June 16, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/WireImage) The road to the 2025 Tony Awards begins Thursday with the announcement of the nominations for Broadway's biggest celebration. Stage and screen stars Sarah Paulson and Wendell Pierce will announce this year's nominations. American Horror Story and American Crime Story star Paulson won a Tony Award in 2024 for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play for her work in Appropriate in 2023. Pierce — who plays a supporting role in Marvel's new movie Thunderbolts* and will star as Daily Planet Editor-in-Chief Perry White in James Gunn's upcoming version of Superman — won a Tony Award in 2012 for producing the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Clybourne Park. LONDON, ENGLAND - APRIL 22: Wendell Pierce attends the "Thunderbolts*" UK Special Screening at ... More Cineworld Leicester Square on April 22, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by) Paulson and Pierce will announce nominations for the 78th annual event in select categories on CBS Mornings on CBS-TV on Thursday at 8:30 a.m. ET. Additional nominations will be announced on the Tony Awards' YouTube channel Thursday at 9 a.m. ET/6 a.m. PT. This year's Tony Awards will be held on Sunday, June 8, at Radio City Musical Hall in New York City, with The Color Purple Tony Award winner and Wicked Best Actress Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo set to host. The awards show will air live on CBS-TV starting at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT and will also stream live on Paramount+ NEW YORK, NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 10: Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal pose during a photo call for ... More "Othello" at Tavern on the Green on February 10, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by) Several major industry publications are predicting the nominees for the 2025 Tony Awards in the major categories. One of them is Variety, which is predicting Buena Vista Social Club, Dead Outlaw, Death Becomes Her, Maybe Happy Ending and Real Women Have Curves as the nominees for Best Musical, with Operation Mincemeat possibly sneaking in as one of the five nominees. For Best Play, Variety is predicting English, The Hills of California, John Proctor is the Villain, Oh, Mary! and Purpose will land the nominations, with a possible nod for Cult of Love for one of the five spots. In the Musical Revival Category, Variety is giving the nod to Floyd Collins, Gypsy, Pirates! The Penzance Musical and Sunset Boulevard with Once Upon a Mattress as a potential nominee; while the publication favors Eureka Day, Glengarry Glen Ross, Othello and Yellow Face for Best Play, with Romeo + Juliet potentially landing a nod. Among the notable stage and screen actors hoping to land Tony nominations in the play categories are George Clooney for Good Night, and Good Luck, Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal for Othello, Sarah Snook in The Picture Of Dorian Gray and Mia Farrow in The Roommate. Some of the familiar faces who could land acting nominations in the musical categories include Nicole Scherzinger for Sunset Blvd., Audra McDonald for Gypsy, Idina Menzel for Redwood, Jonathan Groff for Just in Time and Darren Criss for Maybe Happy Ending. Additionally, the Featured Actor in a Play category could land more than one nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross, with A Real Pain recent Oscar winner Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Michael McKean and Bill Burr all possible nominees. The winners at the 78th annual Tony Awards will be announced on June 8 in New York City. The 2025 Tony Awards will also celebrate Broadway legend Harvey Fierstein, who is being honored with a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre for his contributions to the stage industry.
Forbes
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Alana Arenas Finds Her Purpose On Broadway In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Newest Play
Some playwrights are as musical with their words as jazz musicians. Maestros of rhythm and tone, their sharp dialogue is full of surprises. They build, they riff and their silences between the words are just as riveting. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is one of those playwrights. A Tony-winner last season for his play Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins also was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his plays Gloria and Everybody. His three-dimensional characters can easily inspire empathy and frustration at the same time. Add to that a ferocious sense of comic timing. When Alana Arenas heard about his newest play, Purpose, she ached to be part of the world and, as she says, 'bask in the miracle' of his writing. Even though the play was just 49 pages at that point, she saw how good it was. Purpose centers around the influential and revered Jasper family, who were forces in the Civil Rights movement with deep ties to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Patriarch and pastor, Solomon Jasper (Harry Lennix) and matriarch/sharp-minded lawyer Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) worked hard to instill a sense of purpose, faith, and legacy in their two sons, Junior (Glenn Davis) and Naz (Jon Michael Hill). But this family is seriously fractured with lurking secrets, scandals, and lies. And over and over the sons have failed to live up to the ideals that parents fought for, in quiet and not-so-quiet ways. Then there's Junior's wife, Morgan, who gets embroiled in the drama. She is doing all she can to hold herself, and her family, together. And Naz's friend (Kara Young) also stumbles into the fray. 'The play is a beautiful expression of well-intentioned familial heartbreak,' says Arenas, who originated the role of Morgan at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, which commissioned the Purpose and had its world premiere there last year. Directed by Phylicia Rashad, Purpose is currently playing on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theater. And what does Arenas hope that people come away from Purpose after seeing the play? 'I read a quote that is attributed to Mother Teresa,' shares Arenas. 'It says: 'What can you do to create world peace? Go home and love your family.' Alana Arenas Courtesy Alana Arenas Jeryl Brunner: Morgan has tough edges yet you also feel sympathy for her and all she is facing. How are you able to give her that humanity? Alana Arenas: Morgan is at a point in her life where the many things one could stand to lose have been lost. And that takes away a level of pretense she may have once entertained. Her last efforts to fight for herself and her children require audacity. And the facts of it all are quite disheartening. But if anything can endear her to the audience or any potential allies in the play, I think it would be her tenacity and unwillingness to go down without a fight. Brunner: What did you love about working with Phylicia Rashad? Arenas: Ms. Phylicia is truly a servant of the human spirit. She is really after the truth of the work. I find her to be very collaborative and interested in actors' impulses and then she guides you into a deeper exploration. Brunner: You have a long history performing with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where the play made its world premiere with you playing Morgan. Why do you love performing with the company? Arenas: Steppenwolf feels like family. I am very thankful to call it an artistic home. I have been afforded much growth and development, not just as an artist, but as a human being, because of my relationship with Steppenwolf. And I attribute that to the many incredible artists I have had the pleasure to meet and work with; especially repeated relationships with ensemble members. Purpose is playing at the Helen Hayes Theater Marc J. Franklin
New York Times
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why Black Satire Is the Art Form for Our Absurd Age
LAST SPRING, DURING the Broadway revival of 'Appropriate' (2013), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's sardonic drama about white family members returning to their ancestral plantation home in southeast Arkansas to bury their father, a rare moment of cross-racial candor transpired — not onstage but in the audience. In the third act, Bo, the middle-aged older brother played by Corey Stoll, unleashes a rant about the burdens of whiteness in 21st-century America. Even a passing acquaintance with the work of Jacobs-Jenkins, who's a queer Black man, would condition theatergoers to understand the outburst as satirical exposure of a threadbare fallacy of racial innocence. 'You want me to go back in time and spank my great-great-grandparents?' Bo says. 'Or should I lynch myself? You people just need to say what it is you want me to do and move on! I didn't enslave anybody! I didn't lynch anybody!' The speech usually leaves audiences squirming. On this night, however, one person clapped. 'They were clapping in earnest,' says Jacobs-Jenkins, as if Bo were 'someone who's genuinely out here now just telling his story — you know, 'Found his letters and read each one out loud!'' Before the playwright, actors and audience could fully register what was happening, a voice called out from the darkened auditorium: 'Are you serious right now?' For Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, the whole thing was a delicious disruption. 'Part of what the work is doing is exposing these fissures inside of a community — these feelings that we're encouraged, as we are with most conversations about race in our country, to nurse in private.' At its best, Jacobs-Jenkins says, the theater can become a space to 'risk learning something we didn't anticipate' about one another. Satire is the art of risk. It relies, after all, on an audience comprehending a meaning that runs counter to what the text reads, the screen shows or the comedian says. In this regard, it's vulnerable to misinterpretation and to deliberate distortion. When that satire concerns race and when the audience is as diverse and as divided as the United States is today, those risks compound. Why hazard satire's indirection when even the most straightforward language — the term 'woke,' for instance, or the seemingly incontrovertible good of 'equity' — is manipulated and weaponized against its original ends? Yet perhaps these are the conditions that demand satire most of all, meeting absurdity with absurdity. I spoke with Jacobs-Jenkins, whose new political family drama 'Purpose' is now on Broadway, 10 days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, the same week that Trump gave a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in which he, among other things, called for renaming the Gulf of Mexico the 'Gulf of America,' acquiring Greenland from Denmark and welcoming Canada as the 51st state. The way Jacobs-Jenkins sees it, 'this is probably going to be one of the most difficult moments in recent memory to be an American, but it's also going to be kind of the funniest — because come on! I think the question of this time will be: 'Are you serious right now?'' The Black American satirical tradition, with its roots in the unfathomable dehumanization of slavery and the persistent pressures of racial discrimination, offers equipment by which all of us might better endure and even combat our lacerating realities. Perhaps that's why in recent years satire has surged among Black American writers across all media, extending a longstanding tradition of seeking out laughter to entertain, and to stave off despair. From Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout' (2015) to Kiley Reid's 'Come & Get It' (2024); Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' (2017) to Boots Riley's 'Sorry to Bother You' (2018); Donald Glover's 'Atlanta' (2016-22) to Juel Taylor's 'They Cloned Tyrone' (2023), satire has once again emerged as a defining mode of Black expressive culture, on the page and on the screen. The satirical impulse is, of course, not unique to Black Americans — deep tributaries of wry humor flow from Jewish Americans, L.G.B.T.Q. communities and other groups that the country has continually ostracized. However, the Black tradition has done much to establish the terms of a distinctly American satire, one defined as much by its cleverness as its prophetic truth. The term 'satire' derives from the Latin 'satura,' a 'mixed dish,' in reference to the blend of humor and social critique that characterized classical satirical theater and still defines the form today. Satire is protean, defying taxonomy, though most of it weaponizes irony to expose contradictions, lapses in logic and moral failings, holding them up to ridicule and public account. Satire isn't simply comedy, but it often works through comic tools like caricature, parody and exaggeration. It's a social art, both in its frequent attention to matters of collective interest and in the fact that it's often experienced communally. FOR JACOBS-JENKINS AND many others, the most resounding contemporary satirical voice is the American writer Percival Everett. As the author of 24 novels and several volumes of poetry and collections of short stories, Everett has long enjoyed a reputation as an experimental writer willing to confront the darkest chapters of American history. His 2021 novel, 'The Trees,' is a murder mystery that transpires in the shadow of the unresolved legacy of the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till. The result is unsettling by design: 'I make fun of stuff because it's so ridiculous,' he says. ' 'The Trees' is about lynching. But I don't think that's funny. As someone who comes from a population who's threatened by it, the only way we survive it is by looking at the absurdity of it. If we didn't, we would be scared all the time.' Everett, 68, recalls thinking after the first election of Trump, in 2016, that satire — indeed, comedy as a whole — might be dead. 'How do you parody something that's already a parody?' he asks. Rather than relinquishing his approach, however, he simply redirected it: 'Humor gives us an advantage [as writers],' Everett says. 'If you can get someone laughing, … the reader relaxes. Once someone relaxes, you can do other, more nefarious things to them — like make them think.' Last year, Everett published 'James,' his reimagining of the American classic 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' told through the voice of Mark Twain's enslaved Black character Jim. In the strictest sense, 'James' employs parody and pastiche, drawing broadly from Twain's plot and characters but endowing its first-person narrator with the wit and eloquence that his original creator denied him. Generous readers of Twain's novel, like the writer Ralph Ellison, who bemoaned that 'Twain's bitter satire was taken for comedy,' forgive 'Huck Finn' its many abuses — the 219 instances of the N-word; the indulgent last third of the book (which Ernest Hemingway advised readers to skip), which gives itself over to Jim's gratuitous confinement and petty torture, masterminded by a sadistic Tom Sawyer and a complicit Huck. Everett retains the best of Twain's story — especially the freewheeling adventures of Huck and Jim on the Mississippi — and layers over them a sophisticated satirical register in which Jim, now James, claims agency. The second chapter begins with James leading an unconventional elocution lesson for a group of Black children, instructing them on how best to fracture rather than to refine their English pronunciation. 'White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don't disappoint them,' James tells the children. One of his keen pupils offers up an axiom: 'Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave,' she says. When encountering a kitchen fire, for instance, instead of warning directly, you might instead exclaim, 'Lawdy, missum! Looky dere,' so as not to show up your white mistress. 'What do we call that?' James asks his pupils. Together they respond, 'Signifying.' 'Humor is vengeance,' the novelist Paul Beatty writes. Signifying, a form of semantic indirection, is neatly suited to satire. As the literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. defines it, signifying is encoded linguistic play that exposes 'the figurative difference between the literal and the metaphorical, between surface and latent meaning.' Signifying, like the broad category of satire, is a double-voiced art; it doesn't so much say one thing and mean another as it says one thing and means two. An abiding practice that stretches back through the Black oral tradition — in the playful and profane narrative poems called the toasts, in the games of verbal jousting called the dozens and in sermons and songs — signifying testifies to the centrality of satire as a resource for Black Americans, both artists and everyday people. THE FIRST BLACK American satirists were enslaved, lampooning the rituals and manners of those who called themselves masters. Cakewalks, emulations of white high society's formal promenade dances, were ostensibly performed for the benefit of plantation owners, though in fact they were exquisite parody — exposing white pretensions through Black virtuosity. Traces of this same sensibility are apparent in 19th-century folk lyrics that white listeners often mistook for songs of mirth. Such subtle comic subversions sat beside more overt expressions that centered persuasion over amusement. David Walker's 'Appeal' (1829), a groundbreaking antislavery pamphlet that made the case for abolition decades before Harriet Beecher Stowe's stilted and stoic novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (1852), calls out the hypocrisy of a South Carolina newspaper that had the temerity to label the Turks 'the most barbarous people in the world' for their treatment of the Greeks while advertising a slave auction directly below. 'I declare,' Walker writes, 'it is really so amusing to hear the Southerners and Westerners of this country talk about barbarity, that it is positively, enough to make a man smile.' The Black smile would be cast as caricature starting in the early decades of the 19th century with the advent of blackface minstrelsy, a practice in which white male performers would 'black up' their faces using burned cork, painting on rictus grins of livid red. The songs, skits and comic routines of the minstrel stage served as cruel inversions of Black linguistic fluency and imaginative expression. Satire had no place in minstrelsy because the joke was invariably one-note: punching down at those excluded from the promise of American freedom. In the aftermath of the Civil War, some newly liberated Black performers would take the minstrel stage themselves, introducing a satirical sophistication winking from behind the black mask. This practice extended into the 20th century, most notably with the comic actor Bert Williams, who along with his co-star George Walker created 'In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy' (1903), the first full-length musical written and performed by Black artists to appear on Broadway. The 1920s and '30s were a golden age of American satire, from the acerbic columns of H.L. Mencken to the writings of Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Parker. It's no surprise, then, that Black authors also joined in. Writing in 1925 of the 'younger generation' of Black writers, the architect of the Harlem Renaissance Alain Locke observed that 'reason and realism have cured us of sentimentality: Instead of the wail and appeal, there is challenge and indictment.' Responding to Locke's call, Langston Hughes explored what he lovingly labeled 'the low-down folks, the so-called common element.' His series of stories from the perspective of Jesse B. Semple offered Hughes a means of satirizing both the absurdities of Jim Crow racism and the vanities of Harlem's Black bourgeoisie. Similarly, Hughes's friend and sometime collaborator Zora Neale Hurston explored the comic life of everyday people in her fiction and plays, as well as in her research as a social anthropologist, such as in her folklore collection 'Mules and Men' (1935). And the novelist Wallace Thurman exercised an eviscerating irony in his satirical critique of the Renaissance's own literary elite in his novel 'Infants of the Spring' (1932), a roman à clef that targets everyone from Hughes and Hurston to Countee Cullen and Thurman himself. The greatest satirical practitioner of the Harlem Renaissance, however, was the journalist and writer George S. Schuyler. His 1931 novel, 'Black No More,' is a work of sci-fi comedy with a startling premise: A Black inventor has devised a process that makes Black people's skin paper white. Schuyler turns his gaze not only on the savage inequalities of an American racial caste system but also on the Black leaders whom he believes have enriched themselves and gained their fame by exploiting that very system in the name of racial uplift. Schuyler and other Black writers found the courage to find fault not just without but within. 'At the heart of satire, isn't it about laughter at recognition?' asks the playwright Lynn Nottage. Her forthcoming works include two operas, 'This House' and 'The Highlands,' with librettos co-written with her 27-year-old daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber. Though both make space for laughter, Nottage's satire primarily shows up in a pair of earlier plays, 'By the Way, Meet Vera Stark' (2011) and 'Fabulation, or The Re-education of Undine' (2004), which have enjoyed frequent revivals around the country. Separated by centuries from the satire of the enslaved, Nottage's plays nonetheless share certain bedrock strategies with the early Black tradition. Foremost among them is an understanding of satire as a coded language for communicating intraracial truths, including self-critique. Nottage, 60, recalls debuting 'Fabulation,' a rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of a snooty Black New York publicist who loses it all and is forced to return to her long-abandoned childhood home, at the Off Broadway institution Playwrights Horizons. In a tiny upstairs theater, the uproariously funny play was greeted with near silence. 'We thought, 'Oh, dear. What's happening?'' she says. As the audience filed out, she noticed that it was almost entirely white: 'We realized that we needed a critical mass of Black people who understood all the nuances of the work and who felt like they had permission to laugh at some of the things that were a little more barbed and pointed.' The experience underscored for Nottage the challenge — and opportunity — of writing for a diverse audience. 'You realize,' she adds, 'that there's some truth under everything that resonates.' What happens, though, when the truths audiences take away contradict one another? Call it wrong laughter. In 2005, Dave Chappelle walked away from a $50 million Comedy Central deal to renew his hit sketch program 'The Chappelle Show.' What prompted him to leave, he once explained, was that the wrong people were laughing at the wrong things. To put it plainly, white audiences were laughing at the surface level rather than the satirical intention of his skits. His breakout characters and bits — viral before virality was even a thing, from his 'I'm Rick James, bitch!' catchphrase to his Tyrone Biggums crackhead character — were intended to upend certain cultural scripts and racial stereotypes that, in the minds of some white viewers, they ended up instead reinforcing. TODAY'S BLACK SATIRISTS, however, remain undaunted by the risks of wrong laughter, knowing that it's embedded in the very structure of the genre. 'I feel freer watching him,' the writer Danzy Senna says of Chappelle. 'That's what I want for my readers, that they feel freer when they're reading me.' Last year Senna, 54, who's married to Everett, published her fourth novel, 'Colored Television,' which several reviewers confidently categorized as a Hollywood satire. Senna is less certain: 'I'm always like, 'Am I writing satire?' I don't know.' Though 'Colored Television' includes at least one character — a Black film producer — who reads like a satirical type, the novel as a whole is more humanizing. Even if Senna doesn't consider herself a satirist in any strict sense, she prizes her worldview as a birthright from her late father, Carl Senna, a prominent Black book editor (her mother is the writer Fanny Howe) and a bequest to her and her husband's two teenage sons. 'My kids are Gen Z, and I feel like they're all irony,' she says. Everett recalls instilling that in their sons as a protection against a world that looks at Black and brown boys as a threat. 'I have to tell them, 'You be careful,'' he says. 'But if that's all they hear, they'll walk through the world scared to death and angry.' 'Humor is vengeance,' the novelist Paul Beatty writes in his introduction to his anthology of Black humor, 'Hokum' (2006). 'Sometimes you laugh to keep from crying. Sometimes you laugh to keep from shooting.' Below the surface of satire is often a well of anger, what the novelist and satirical master Ishmael Reed terms 'comic aggression.' Why write satires, though, when you can take to the streets? Senna — who as a child attended protests with her mother and was involved in activism for South African divestment in high school; and who last spring joined demonstrations for Palestine in Downtown Los Angeles — draws a bright line between political speech and her own art. 'The language of those protests is always completely antithetical to anything that would interest me to write,' she says. 'It's not satire; it's a very purposeful kind of shouting slogans with a mob of people.' Still, speaking for the unrepresented is part of satire's ethos. Despite attempts by those in power to co-opt it, satire remains an outsider's art — or perhaps the art of an inside-outsider: someone who has certain access and insight into the people and the organizations they're targeting. 'Our political system is all so unserious,' says the comic writer and performer Ziwe, 33, who grew up in Massachusetts as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants and interned after college at both The Onion and 'The Colbert Report.' 'I can't live and move through that as myself. I have to be separated because then I can judge, and that allows me to make something that has teeth.' She honed her craft through Instagram Lives, followed by a Showtime series, on which she refined an awkward, blunt and often flat persona. Her satire usually stems from silence, which induces her guests — from the disgraced former congressman George Santos to the convicted con artist Anna Delvey — to expose their own vices and vanities. Satire is, in part, the art of tone, and tone is notoriously difficult to convey in any medium, much less the written word. Expressed in song, however, satire benefits from the shadings of voice, melody and chord phrasings. On her song 'Denial Is a River' (2024), the 26-year-old rapper Doechii literalizes satire's double-voicedness by bifurcating her own, rapping in her normal voice and speaking back to herself — exhorting, cajoling, correcting — as a pitched-up sonic superego. On the surface, the song sounds playful and comic; Doechii raps with swagger about her newfound success, even as her other voice won't let her brush away her past traumas. The song became her first Billboard-charting hit, a feat she commemorated in a post this past January on the social network X: 'My first solo entry is a satire about one of the lowest points in my life and has no hook,' she wrote. 'As an artist, I feel the vulnerability of being in this moment,' says the playwright Nottage. 'The question becomes, 'How far can you push the boundaries?'' One thinks of Richard Pryor's 1976 album 'Bicentennial Nigger,' which concludes with the searing title track, recorded live at the Comedy Store in Hollywood. His voice closely miked, he plays both to the intimate crowd at the club and to the wider audience that would hear the album at home. 'A lot of people think I'm trying to offend whites and be nasty to them, but I'm not,' Pryor told The Los Angeles Times that year. 'I'm looking for truth and trying to be funny at the same time.' 'You all know how Black humor started. It started in slave ships,' Pryor says, beginning a 15-second distillation of 400 years of Black comedy. 'Cat was on his way over here rowing. Then dude said, 'What you laughing about, man?' He say, 'Yesterday I was a king.'' It's a potent punch line, though not a laugh line. In Pryor's typical manner, he conjures a character from this tragic conceit: a 200-year-old Black minstrel performer with 'stars and stripes on his forehead.' In the two-minute monologue that follows, recited while a military band plays 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,' Pryor's character recounts Black America's journey from the Middle Passage to the present day. 'I'm just so happy. I don't know what to do,' he exclaims. 'I don't know what to do if I don't get 200 more years of this. Lord have mercy. Yessiree,' he says, punctuating each line with a grotesque guffaw. You can hear the audience laughing too — nervously, a laughter of incomplete release. Pryor's character is relentless, his testimony careening toward conclusion as the song resolves. 'I don't know where my own mama is now,' he says. 'She up yonder in that big white folks house in the sky. Y'all probably done forgot about it.' A pause for breath, and then in the last words of the album, Pryor rips off the satirical mask and speaks in his own solemn voice: 'But I ain't never gon' forget it.'
New York Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In ‘The Great Privation,' Fending Off the Body Snatchers
In the middle of the night in autumn 1832, a mother and her teenage daughter stand guard beside a freshly filled grave. They are not certain they need to be there, but Missy Freeman, the newly widowed mother, suspects the rumors are true: that body snatchers, also known as resurrectionists, have been digging up Black corpses and stealing them away. When a young white man appears in the darkness, Missy knows he has come to disinter her husband, Moses, dead of cholera and laid to rest only that afternoon. With impeccable composure, she tells the grave robber, who is a medical student, that they are there to pray. He backs off, menacingly. 'Be sure to not get caught by the police,' he says. 'Ladies shouldn't be out so late.' In Nia Akilah Robinson's new play, 'The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar),' Missy (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and her daughter, 16-year-old Charity (Clarissa Vickerie), will not be deterred from keeping vigil while Moses's body decomposes. As Charity says: 'We must make it to three days with Daddy untouched. Then the bad men won't return.' Directed by Evren Odcikin for Soho Rep, 'The Great Privation' rummages around in the tainted soil of the United States and pulls up some shameful old skeletons for inspection. From the start, though, a defiant light radiates through this tale, and comedy shares space with disquietude. Warm, dexterous central performances from Lucas-Perry and Vickerie (a graduate student at Juilliard making her Off Broadway debut) have a lot to do with that. Informed by the history of Black bodies being used without consent in medical research, the play takes place on the same plot of land two centuries apart. In the 1800s, it is the burial ground at the African Baptist Church in Philadelphia, not far from Jefferson Medical College. In our time, it is a sleep-away summer camp where Minnie Chillous (Lucas-Perry), née Freeman, and her daughter, Charity (Vickerie), happen to be working as counselors alongside the amusingly dramatic John (Miles G. Jackson) and their strait-laced supervisor, Cuffee (Holiday). Modern-day Charity — rebellious, irreverent, smart — is eager to know more about her matrilineal heritage, hoping to find heroes who might come in handy for a college application essay. Instead, in a plot twist reminiscent of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's 'Appropriate,' she discovers historical violence. The way Charity and Minnie respond to that unearthed legacy is quite beautiful, and deliberately Shakespearean. Another echo, early in the play, comes when the grave robber, John (also played by Jackson), intrudes on Missy and Charity in the cemetery — a disruption as jarring, if not as heightened, as the one by the white interloper with the picnic basket in Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu's 'Pass Over.' Next to Moses's grave stands an enormous tree, its thickly textured bark resembling interwoven roots. (The set is by Mariana Sanchez.) Throughout, a digital time clock hangs above the stage: a hint that realism is not to be expected. Starting at 72:00:00, it counts down the hours of the safeguarding of Moses's body, though the clock is presented without context, so the numbers' significance may not be evident. Robinson, a graduate playwriting student at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, is comfortable with audience confusion, wanting somewhat to blur then with now. Yet a pivotal scene in which the 19th and 21st centuries mingle would land more powerfully with a touch more clarity. There are a couple of spots, too, where characters sound less like themselves than mouthpieces for the author. But those are quibbles. 'The Great Privation' is the first Soho Rep production in the company's temporary home at Playwrights Horizons, and it feels reassuringly like Soho Rep: robust, questing, enlivening new work, now whipped up in Hell's Kitchen.
