Latest news with #Aziza
The Independent
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Kara Young, already on a Broadway streak, could make Tony history with her role in 'Purpose'
Don't bother asking Kara Young which one of her roles is her favorite. They're all her favorite. 'Every single time I'm doing a show, I feel like it is the most important thing on the planet,' she says. 'I don't have a favorite. It's like this: Every, every single project has held its own weight.' Right now, the weighty project on her mind is Broadway 's celebrated 'Purpose,' Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' drawing-room drama at the Helen Hayes Theater about an accomplished Black family revealing its hypocrisy and fault lines during a snowed-in gathering. 'There's so much in this play,' says Young, who plays an outsider who witnesses the implosion. 'Like a lot of the great writers, he creates these universes in a line or the space between the words.' A tense family gathering 'Purpose' is set in the Jasper family's living room in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Chicago. The patriarch is Pastor Solomon Jasper, a Civil Rights legend, and his steely wife, Claudine. They are reuniting with their two sons — Junior, a disgraced former state senator, recently released after serving a prison sentence for embezzling funds, and Naz, who fled divinity school and is now a nature photographer. Young plays Aziza, a Harlem-bred social worker who has been close friends with Naz but didn't know anything about his family. 'This kind of thing never happens to me! I never meet famous people and you've been famous this whole time?' she screams. Her awe quickly fades as sibling jealousies, parental frustrations, past sins and the pressures of legacy come tumbling out over a fraught dinner. There is some slapping. 'We are so susceptible to get angry with the people we love the most,' says Young. 'What we're seeing in the less than 12 hours of them being together for the first time in two years, they're sitting down and having dinner, and all of these things come up, as they often do.' Young poised to make history Young's work has earned her a Tony Award nomination and a chance to make history. Already the first Black person to be nominated four times consecutively, if she wins, she'll be the first Black performer to win two Tonys in a row. Young made her Broadway debut in 2021 in 'Clyde's,' was in 'Cost of Living' the next year and co-starred opposite Leslie Odom Jr. in 2024's 'Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch,' winning a Tony. Jacobs-Jenkins calls Aziz in his script a 'deeply perceptive person and empathetic' and that could also apply to Young, She says she closely identifies with her character in 'Purpose,' — they're both Harlem-bred advocates for others, hoping to make the planet better. 'I feel connected to that core of her,' says Young. 'Every single play I've done since my 10-minute play festivals, I'm always like, 'Wow, this feels like this can change the world,' you know? And I feel like at the core of Aziza, that's how she feels. She wants to change the world.' 'Purpose,' directed by Phylicia Rashad, also stars LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix, Jon Michael Hill, Alana Arenas and Glenn Davis. ' Joy and curiosity and enthusiasm' Hill, who as Naz also earned a Tony nomination for best lead male actor in a play, calls Young 'the heart and joy of our little family over there at the Helen Hayes.' 'She enters the building and she just makes time for everyone and is genuinely excited to see people and hear about how they're doing,' he says. 'I've really never seen anyone have as much room in their consciousness and their being for everyone she encounters. She approaches every day with joy and curiosity and enthusiasm.' If there's one story that shows who Young is, it would be from the day of the Met Gala, which she and cast members of 'Purpose' were invited, along with its playwright. That same day, Jacobs-Jenkins won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Young found out while getting her makeup done and began screaming. When she got to the gala — a look-at-me moment, if there ever was one — she was a walking advertisement for the play. 'I told everybody, 'You have to come and see this play. He just won a Pulitzer!'' Hill was right behind her and smiling as Young made connections and introductions. 'She was just going up to everyone and introducing us and talking about our show and trying to get folks in the door.' Young made her 2016 stage debut in Patricia Ione Lloyd's play 'Pretty Hunger' at the Public Theater, a play about a 7-year-old Black girl who didn't know she was Black. The playwright told her she wrote it with Young in mind. 'Ione Lloyd is one of the people who really made me see myself as an artist,' she says. 'She's the one that kind of set a path for me in a really beautiful way.' Next up for Young is the movie 'Is God Is,' which playwright Aleshea Harris is directing from her own 2018 stage play. Sterling K. Brown, Vivica A. Fox and Janelle Monáe are in the cast. Young calls it 'a spaghetti Western-meets-Tarantino-meets-the Greeks.' Next summer on Broadway, she'll star in a revival of 'The Whoopi Monologues' opposite Kerry Washington. After that, who knows? 'I don't know what's next, but I can't wait, whatever that is,' she says. 'If something comes along, it's about jumping into the next thing. If there's life in me, I got to live it.' ___ For more coverage of the 2025 Tony Awards, visit:
Associated Press
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Kara Young, already on a Broadway streak, could make Tony history with her role in 'Purpose'
NEW YORK (AP) — Don't bother asking Kara Young which one of her roles is her favorite. They're all her favorite. 'Every single time I'm doing a show, I feel like it is the most important thing on the planet,' she says. 'I don't have a favorite. It's like this: Every, every single project has held its own weight.' Right now, the weighty project on her mind is Broadway's celebrated 'Purpose,' Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' drawing-room drama at the Helen Hayes Theater about an accomplished Black family revealing its hypocrisy and fault lines during a snowed-in gathering. 'There's so much in this play,' says Young, who plays an outsider who witnesses the implosion. 'Like a lot of the great writers, he creates these universes in a line or the space between the words.' A tense family gathering 'Purpose' is set in the Jasper family's living room in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Chicago. The patriarch is Pastor Solomon Jasper, a Civil Rights legend, and his steely wife, Claudine. They are reuniting with their two sons — Junior, a disgraced former state senator, recently released after serving a prison sentence for embezzling funds, and Naz, who fled divinity school and is now a nature photographer. Young plays Aziza, a Harlem-bred social worker who has been close friends with Naz but didn't know anything about his family. 'This kind of thing never happens to me! I never meet famous people and you've been famous this whole time?' she screams. Her awe quickly fades as sibling jealousies, parental frustrations, past sins and the pressures of legacy come tumbling out over a fraught dinner. There is some slapping. 'We are so susceptible to get angry with the people we love the most,' says Young. 'What we're seeing in the less than 12 hours of them being together for the first time in two years, they're sitting down and having dinner, and all of these things come up, as they often do.' Young poised to make history Young's work has earned her a Tony Award nomination and a chance to make history. Already the first Black person to be nominated four times consecutively, if she wins, she'll be the first Black performer to win two Tonys in a row. Young made her Broadway debut in 2021 in 'Clyde's,' was in 'Cost of Living' the next year and co-starred opposite Leslie Odom Jr. in 2024's 'Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch,' winning a Tony. Jacobs-Jenkins calls Aziz in his script a 'deeply perceptive person and empathetic' and that could also apply to Young, She says she closely identifies with her character in 'Purpose,' — they're both Harlem-bred advocates for others, hoping to make the planet better. 'I feel connected to that core of her,' says Young. 'Every single play I've done since my 10-minute play festivals, I'm always like, 'Wow, this feels like this can change the world,' you know? And I feel like at the core of Aziza, that's how she feels. She wants to change the world.' 'Purpose,' directed by Phylicia Rashad, also stars LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix, Jon Michael Hill, Alana Arenas and Glenn Davis. 'Joy and curiosity and enthusiasm' Hill, who as Naz also earned a Tony nomination for best lead male actor in a play, calls Young 'the heart and joy of our little family over there at the Helen Hayes.' 'She enters the building and she just makes time for everyone and is genuinely excited to see people and hear about how they're doing,' he says. 'I've really never seen anyone have as much room in their consciousness and their being for everyone she encounters. She approaches every day with joy and curiosity and enthusiasm.' If there's one story that shows who Young is, it would be from the day of the Met Gala, which she and cast members of 'Purpose' were invited, along with its playwright. That same day, Jacobs-Jenkins won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Young found out while getting her makeup done and began screaming. When she got to the gala — a look-at-me moment, if there ever was one — she was a walking advertisement for the play. 'I told everybody, 'You have to come and see this play. He just won a Pulitzer!'' Hill was right behind her and smiling as Young made connections and introductions. 'She was just going up to everyone and introducing us and talking about our show and trying to get folks in the door.' Young made her 2016 stage debut in Patricia Ione Lloyd's play 'Pretty Hunger' at the Public Theater, a play about a 7-year-old Black girl who didn't know she was Black. The playwright told her she wrote it with Young in mind. 'Ione Lloyd is one of the people who really made me see myself as an artist,' she says. 'She's the one that kind of set a path for me in a really beautiful way.' Next up for Young is the movie 'Is God Is,' which playwright Aleshea Harris is directing from her own 2018 stage play. Sterling K. Brown, Vivica A. Fox and Janelle Monáe are in the cast. Young calls it 'a spaghetti Western-meets-Tarantino-meets-the Greeks.' Next summer on Broadway, she'll star in a revival of 'The Whoopi Monologues' opposite Kerry Washington. After that, who knows? 'I don't know what's next, but I can't wait, whatever that is,' she says. 'If something comes along, it's about jumping into the next thing. If there's life in me, I got to live it.' ___ For more coverage of the 2025 Tony Awards, visit:
Winnipeg Free Press
6 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Operation Ezra going strong
Ten years have passed since Michel Aziza met with Nafiya Naso, a young woman from Winnipeg's small Yazidi community, and offered to help her raise awareness about the plight of the Yazidi people in Iraq and arrange support for their sponsorship to Canada. The Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking ethnic minority who follow an ancient monotheistic religion that combines aspects of different faiths. Concentrated primarily in the Sinjar region of Northern Iraq, they have been the victims of persecution by their neighbours for generations. That persecution culminated in August 2014 when ISIS invaded the Sinjar region, displacing, killing, kidnapping and enslaving thousands of Yazidi men, women and children. Nafiya and her sister Jamileh Naso had arrived in Winnipeg as children when their parents were accepted to Canada as refugees in 1999, long before the events of that terrible summer. But when the sisters learned about the terror being wrought on the Yazidis remaining in Iraq, which included many of their extended family members, they were spurred into action. That action led Nafiya to her first of many meetings with Aziza and a small group of Jewish community members. 'We ended the meeting by agreeing to help rescue as many refugees as we could by raising funds and also helping Nafiya continue on with her advocacy work and her efforts to raise awareness,' Aziza explains. That agreement was formalized with the creation of an initiative called Operation Ezra. 'For me personally, it was simply an opportunity to do the right thing and help people who at the time were being persecuted,' Aziza says. 'I had always wondered how and why some people decided to help Jews during the Holocaust while others stood by. This was my opportunity to engage with another community with no other motive than to help.' Operation Ezra's first order of business was to complete the documentation and raise the funds to privately sponsor Nafiya's uncle, aunt and their six children to Canada. When that family descended the escalator at Winnipeg's airport in July 2016, Nafiya's father rushed to embrace his brother. They had not seen one another for 26 years! After making that initial reunion possible, Operation Ezra continued its fundraising and sponsorship efforts, reaching out in the process to other local faith communities for assistance in increasing awareness and financial support, completing sponsorship documentation, and, often after years of waiting, welcoming the newcomers to Winnipeg and helping with their resettlement. To date, Operation Ezra has privately sponsored 11 Yazidi families, representing 67 people, to Winnipeg, and has applications in process for another 20 people. 'Operation Ezra became one of the largest private rescue efforts for Yazidis in the world,' Jamileh says. 'Jews, Yazidis, Christians, and allies came together to save lives, reunite families, and help survivors rebuild. What began as a local sponsorship effort, quickly grew into a powerful, multi-faith movement rooted in justice, solidarity, and shared humanity.' That spirit of activism, Jamileh adds, led her to found the Canadian Yazidi Association as 'a survivor-led voice for the missing, the displaced, and the resilient.' In 2016, the Yazidi association and Operation Ezra successfully lobbied the Canadian government to establish its own rescue operation to bring Yazidis to Canada. 'The intense lobbying at the federal level,' Aziza explains, 'resulted into the sponsorship of approximately 1,200 Yazidis to Canada, 250 of whom came to Winnipeg.' Those 250 individuals, mostly women and children, were, and continue to be, supported by Operation Ezra in the same way as those who were privately sponsored by the group. Operation Ezra helped find housing and employment for the new arrivals, enrolled children in school, provided translators, organized adult English classes, ran a kids' soccer league, and developed innovative programs to enable the newcomers' integration and self-sufficiency. One of these programs is the Healing Farm, where Yazidi volunteers harvest thousands of kilograms of seasonal produce annually that they then distribute among their community and to local food banks. Most of the Yazidis who arrived in Winnipeg in the last decade have adapted well to Canada. They are working, studying, raising families, and volunteering, and are grateful for the safety and stability of their new home. For some, however, the terror and trauma of their past endures. Sundays Kevin Rollason's Sunday newsletter honouring and remembering lives well-lived in Manitoba. 'I sit with mothers who haven't heard from their daughters in over a decade,' Jamileh says. 'I walk beside youth once held in ISIS captivity, now rediscovering their language and sense of self. I fight for access to culturally competent mental health care … and for justice that has been far too long denied.' With close to 3,000 Yazidis still considered missing and thousands more living in refugee camps, the work of Operation Ezra and the Canadian Yazidi Association is not done. 'We have a list of thousands of families who regularly reach out, pleading for help,' Nafiya says. A decade after Operation Ezra was created, Nafiya, Jamileh, Michel and the group's many other volunteers remain determined to rescue, reunite and resettle Yazidi refugees in Winnipeg — a city that has become a sanctuary for a long beleaguered people. swchisvin@ The Free Press is committed to covering faith in Manitoba. If you appreciate that coverage, help us do more! Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow us to deepen our reporting about faith in the province. Thanks! 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The Guardian
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Purpose review – dysfunctional family drama hits highs and lows
Technically speaking, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' new play Purpose isn't about a dysfunctional family reuniting for the holidays and revealing various fractures and secrets in their relationships – not the holiday part, anyway. The Jasper family, led by prominent Black activist Solomon Jasper (Harry Lennix), is getting together in Chicago under far less superficially merry circumstances: yes, it's a relief that older son Junior (Glenn Davis) has recently been released from prison following time served for a campaign-fraud conviction, but his wife, Morgan (Alana Arenas), is about to begin her own sentence for her role in these crimes, understandably bitter about where her loyalties have landed her. The couple was allowed to serve consecutively in light of their having young children – whose absence from this gathering bothers willful matriarch Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) to no end, especially because it's nominally a celebration of her weeks-earlier birthday. The show's narrator, withdrawn younger son Nazareth (Jon Michael Hill), accidentally provides the token outsider via his friend Aziza (Kara Young), who volunteers to drive him after he misses his flight. Jacobs-Jenkins and director Phylicia Rashad seem aware of the home-for-the-holidays trappings of his story, adding little touches that evoke that spirit and its evasiveness here, like one character enthusing over food-prep that makes it feel like 'Thanksgiving came early' and an impending snowstorm that winds up keeping Aziza at the Jasper household overnight. Not being sure when, exactly, this not-quite-holiday story is taking place (October? February?) adds a clever sense of displacement to the proceedings, exacerbating the suspicion that whatever familial togetherness the Jaspers are looking for may be forced, rather than naturally embraced. Purpose has a lot more off-kilter awkwardness where this came from, not always so productive. A sprawling work despite taking place over less than 24 hours, the play is absolutely packed with monologues, speeches and recriminations, even before it gets to the centerpiece dinner-table blow-up that inevitably concludes its first act. (The speechifying doesn't let up in the second act, either.) The Solomon character is clearly inspired by Jesse Jackson: a man of God and civil rights speaker whose prominence peaked in the 1980s and whose son was later convicted of campaign fraud. So it's natural that Purpose would address its themes – the pressures of Black excellence, the crushing nature of familial expectations that come without actual instruction, and the stigma of mental illness, among other topics – with a whole lot of oratorical flair. Davis, Jackson, Lennix and Arenas all get a chance to thunder at each other, and even the less confrontational moments feature torrents of words. There's so much of this direct-address material that its effectiveness can vary wildly from moment to moment. At the outset, it's helpful scene-setting, and once the family sparks start to fly, Hill manages some quick asides that bring the house down. But Jacobs-Jenkins also uses Nazareth's soliloquies to explain character motivations, fill in brief time jumps, underline themes, and sometimes just flat-out describe scenes that aren't actually dramatized. If this self-interrupting technique functioned as a running commentary more consistently, it might feel like a subversion of familiar melodrama. Instead, these moments often bear so much weight that they come across like a hasty solution to writing problems that Jacobs-Jenkins couldn't quite crack. In a preview performance, the actors seemed to bear some of that burden. Hill, forced to begin the whole show with paragraphs of speech, was the first to flub a line, but he wasn't the last or only one; good as the cast is, almost everyone stumbled verbally at some point, suggesting that the text itself might need some further smoothing out. The one performer who deftly avoids the dramaturgical awkwardness is Young, a recent Tony winner for the terrific revival of Purlie Victorious. Aziza could have been a simple audience surrogate, but Young plays her with an expansive skill set: her comic surprise at learning who Nazareth's family is (and has been, as she says, 'this whole time', turning a simple observation into a punchline); the believable physical comedy of her recalling the lineup of Black heroes that adorned her elementary school wall alongside Solomon's portrait; the rush of nervous emotion when she defends Nazareth's sexual identity during dinner. She can turn on a dime from broadly hilarious to subtly devastating, a true dynamo. Davis is another cast standout as he swings from political blowhard to schemer to wreck. All of those swings and pivots lend the show an entertaining boldness. It's certainly cathartic to see a work so unafraid to go big and risk bad laughs by letting serious strife spill over into farce. Yet there's something dramatically strenuous about the sheer tonnage Jacobs-Jenkins packs into these two and a half hours. The repeated pauses for Nazareth's addresses reflect that, refusing to let the material breathe, almost as if fearful of leaving something out – or even simply leaving things unsaid. And for all the show's muchness, it ends on a moment that feels both delicately ambiguous and vaguely unearned. Its title suggests a singularity of motivation that the play, for better and worse, never comes close to evoking – or achieving.
