By Ron Fassler
It’s been 20 years since Bridge and Tunnel, the first of Sarah Jones’s one-woman shows, captivated Broadway audiences and won her a Special Tony Award. Portraying more than a dozen characters, Jones drew upon people she encountered from performing slam poetry years earlier at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a cultural icon on New York’s Lower East Side. Ten years later, she returned off-Broadway with Sell/Buy/Date, a show about sex workers which one critic called, “the next 100 years of the world’s oldest profession” (made into a film in 2022, you can view the trailer here). In between creating shows, Jones keeps busy as a human rights activist. She has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, bringing attention to issues that include ethnic/racial, gender, and economic disparities in the U.S. and globally. She is also the first artist in history to sue the Federal Communications Commission for censorship during a battle over her poem/song “Your Revolution.”
So, she’s got that going for her.
Jones’s latest project, America, Who Hurt You?, which opened tonight for a limited engagement at the Polonsky Shakespeare Theater in Brooklyn, is something she tells us is “a work in progress—and considering the current news cycle, I have to revise it twice a day.” If the title sounds familiar, it’s the same as her podcast of the past two years which, according to Jones, has helped shape this stage version. Having guests like Jane Fonda, Laverne Cox, and Tarana Burke, founder of the Me Too movement, has apparently inspired much of the conversation she is now having with characters of her own creation.
On a nearly bare stage (a raised platform, a screen for a backdrop and, off to the side, a video on a tripod), Jones once again brilliantly embodies more than a dozen men and women emotionally, physically, and vocally. Her ability to go from one to the other is a practiced art; one that she does with enormous subtlety and never in a grandstanding manner. She simply inhabits one character to the next, whether it be Lorraine, an elderly Jewish woman, or Rashid, a self-proclaimed “Black dude,” and even a gay Japanese man. She plays them all earnestly, never in parody and, it would appear, embraces them all as equals. No one is ever talked down to.
The subject here, as it is on the podcast, is “How have we gotten to this place and what are we going to do about?” To that end, Jones makes America itself one of her characters—a hapless Gen Z’er, no less. After all, who better than someone so young to comment on our current state of “digital dementia,” as Jones has phrased it. As she views it, “America is one large, multi-racial dysfunctional family.” And she’s not wrong. In one of the plays best extended sequences, she is seen live on video, projected onto the back screen in tight close-up, working through 7 or 8 different portraits of people. They are all riveting, and I mean all.
Director Eric Ting, who did beautiful work on Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance a few seasons back, brings sensitivity and shading in helping Jones stay balanced. Stefania Bulbarella’s video design is smartly done and Jiyoun Chang, responsible for the scenic design, does a fine job with the lighting as well. The handsome pantsuit Jones wears has been designed by Toni-Leslie James and Palmer Hefferan’s sound design is excellent.
Late in the evening, Jones explains that she doesn’t create characters as much as they come looking for her. May I suggest that you go look for her? If you are as yet unaware of the talents of this writer/actress/activist, you owe it to yourself to take a trip to Brooklyn and revel in her presence. Self-deprecatingly, she concludes by saying that her show is “a work in progress written by a work in progress.” After twenty years at this, may her progress continue for another twenty—and another twenty after that.
America, Who Hurt You? is at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn now through October 4th. Set to play across the U.S. in connection with its 250th Anniversary, it is being produced (among other) by Theatre for a New Audience and the National Black Theatre. For ticket information, please click here.
Photos by HanJee Chow.
