Actress Young discusses landing a last-minute role in the Broadway revival of 'Proof' alongside Donald Cheadle and Ayo Edebiri, her experience balancing film promotion with rehearsals, and her feelings about the play's lack of Tony Award nominations. She also recounts a coincidental encounter with Cheadle on the set of another film, 'I Love Boosters'.
Then Young got a call from her agents. We’re sitting on the 31st floor of the Park Lane hotel, looking out over the expanse of Central Park.
Young, wearing vintage Dolce, is wrapped in a towel to protect her makeup—and, I think, for a bit of comfort after a long day of press for play she thought she wouldn’t be starring in. But when she learned that a revival of David Auburn’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winner Proof, starring Oscar-nominee Donald Cheadle and Emmy winner Ayo Edebiri, was looking for an emergency replacement to play a key role—Claire, older sister of Edebiri’s troubled Cathy—there was only one possible answer.
“I was like, ‘Yeah,’” she says with a giggle. When the nominations were announced on Tuesday morning, Young didn’t wind up scoring one for Proof; the play was totally blanked by the awards. About a week before the reveal, Young was feeling pensive.
“I can't lie and say that I haven't thought about it,” she said back then. “It's been a very human thing. I'm doing a play. You know what I mean?
” I do, of course. Young had gotten the call to return to Broadway right after she arrived in Austin to promote a movie: Boots Riley’s gonzo-socialist comedy I Love Boosters, featuring Young in a plum supporting role. She missed the film’s South by Southwest premiere after hightailing it back to New York for Proof, which was already deep in rehearsal. After a few mishaps— cancelled flights, deplanings—Young landed back in New York, and started rehearsal the next day.
Looking back on it, there were some cosmic signs that Young was destined to join the Proof.
“I was shooting I Love Boosters…. I’m on set, and I’m, like, chopping it up with this older Black gentleman. We’re just talking about life. And then Boots is like, “‘Yo, that’s Don Cheadle over there.
’” Yes, Young was completely unaware that she was chopping it up with her Proof future costar, who also appears in I Love Boosters in a ton of makeup.
“He was in a ton of prosthetics,” she says. “I had no idea. ” Young also played Claire in a reading with the cast months prior.
“It was less than a few hours, and we just did the reading for a small group of people,” she recalls. “And that was that. ” Initially, Orange Is the New Black star Samira Wiley was supposed to play Claire. On March 17, she announced that she had to exit the production due to “a treatable medical condition that calls for her full attention.
” “No, I don’t know what happened, but I just sent her my love,” says Young. There’s no bad blood between the actors: Wiley “sent flowers on opening night, which I thought was really beautiful,” Young says.
“Always love and vibrations for my fellow sisters and artists. When we need to take care of ourselves, we need to take care of ourselves. ” But Young also knows as well as anyone that the show must go on—even under extraordinarily tight circumstances. Typically, a Broadway show rehearses for three and a half weeks, following ample prep time for each actor; “I had five days in the room, and then I went to tech,” she says.
Joining Cheadle, Edebiri, and costar Jin Ha as they stared down the barrel of opening night was “quick, dirty, fast, to the point,” she says. Other considerations made this production of Proof tricky. The play, which follows flailing college dropout and brilliant mathematician Cathy in the wake of her father’s death, was originally written with white actors in mind.
A young Mary-Louise Parker won her first Tony for playing Cathy in 2001; Gwyneth Paltrow played the same role in a film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins, Hope Davis, and Jake Gyllenhaal. In the revival, directed by Hamilton helmer Thomas Kail, everyone in the cast is a person of color—adding previously unexplored dimensions to the play’s already complicated family and power dynamics.
“There are so many levels of complexities when you bring up education, or when talks about dropping out of school to take care of dad,” says Young, getting audibly activated. “Or understanding the sacrifice of what it means to be a caretaker. Understanding what it means to sell a home in a university town. Now we’re talking about gentrification, right?
The Black genius, Black legacy—there’s so many other themes. ” It’s clear that this type of work—unpacking the big ideas that buoy every line reading, every choice—is what makes Young tick, even more than the prospect of landing a killer joke or getting a standing ovation.
“Even now, it’s about constantly building history. Now we’re a month in, and this is when I would be in tech,” she says. Young’s Claire is sharp and practical—not an addled genius like her father or sister, but a prickly, pragmatic, and perhaps underappreciated elder sister with a plan that she intends to execute.
“I find Claire to be a shark,” she says. She’s playing against type in the role. Usually, Young gravitates more toward salt-of-the-earth or spiritually woo-woo characters, most recently in Purpose. But when I float this idea, Young challenges that claim.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “I don’t know if I have a type, but I also have…” She pauses, thinks. “I don’t think I’ve ever played a woman like Claire. ” Still, Young knows that “a Claire exists in me.
” Born and raised in Harlem, Young can’t help but identify with the character’s city spirit.
“I’m from New York, and we know what it is to be going through these streets,” Young says with pride. “We know what it is to be an institution. We know what it is to have to fight for ourselves. We understand how to code-switch.
We know what the fuck that is. I know the levels in which Claire can exist in that regard. I’ve been in predominantly white spaces at times. I’ve been the only Black girl in a room.
I know what that’s like. Your body does something very different when you are in those spaces. ” And the show has gone on. Big names like Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, and Barack and Michelle Obama have already come to see it, some before it officially opened on April 16.
“George Clooney was really crazy,” she says. Thankfully, Young and her fictional sister have a much more functional relationship than the siblings they play on stage.
“I love her so much. She’s so remarkable to me,” she says of The Bear star.
“Me and Ayo do this exercise that she taught us. We throw our energy from the up and down and right and left and front and back, but legato and then staccato. We do it maybe four times in a row. ” Her costar is also harboring a secret talent: “She’s a great singer.
So is Don Cheadle. ” Young claims not to be a singer herself; all of her Tony noms have come for straight plays. But she is expanding her artistic footprint in other directions. Along with I Love Boosters, Young will lead her first feature film this May: Is God Is?
, a film adapted from Obie Award-winner Aleshea Harris’s play.
“It’s a funny, dark, gothic narrative, spaghetti Western meets Greek tragedy,” she says. “It’s, like, the full spectrum of Black humanity. ” With two movies and an unexpected starring role on Broadway, one might imagine Young is close to burnout. One would be mistaken.
“I haven’t had a day off,” she says. “But it’s like how we’ve been grinding for years,” she adds. “Even when I was working five jobs and managing my life so that I could do a play or be in a rehearsal or do a reading, I always felt like, ‘Okay, this is where I’m supposed to be right now,’” she says. Those jobs include, but are not limited to: brunch manager, coat-check girl, hostess at the Carnegie Club, babysitter, and office drone.
Young is aware that anytime she steps on Broadway stage, she’s liable to find herself in contention for an award—even if she didn’t get a nod this year. Luckily, her primary motivation is internal.
“There’s a lot of energy around certain things where I almost have to not think about it because tonight is the show,” she says. She pivots into speaking from Claire’s perspective.
“I’m worried about Claire right now. Now it’s about loving your sister the most so that you can take care of her, so that she can be okay, so that she can go back to school, so that she can get the proper healthcare she needs. ” She takes a look out over the park, completely at ease. “That is the task at hand. That is the work. ”
Broadway Proof Donald Cheadle Ayo Edebiri I Love Boosters
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