Review: Satire Comes in All Colors in Ossie Davis’s ‘Purlie Victorious’
8 / 10
At the center of this prodigious cast and Leon’s clockwork staging—the pearl if you will—is Kara Young. With several Off Broadway and now three Broadway shows to her credit, Young (Cost of Living, Clyde’s) always astonishes. She’s a walking paradox: demure yet fiery; petite but imposing; seemingly naïve yet a conduit of deep, witchy wisdom. Her physical comedy is outrageous, especially when Lutiebelle, worked into a tizzy about facing Cotchipee, falls apart and reassembles right in front of us. Wobbling on heels, one hip jutted out in a burlesque of urbanity, arching neck and back 30 degrees upstage to catch prompts from Purlie as her eyelids alternate between dilated terror and fluttering on the verge of a fainting spell, Young seems to have packed the clowning of five virtuosi in one compact body. Purlie is victorious indeed; but anyone who gets to see Young in her comic glory is a winner.
