Somewhere behind Sarah Jones’s sternum, a crowd of characters exists in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be tapped to life. As an actor, Jones is an extraordinary vessel, holding these many people inside her and letting them speak through her, one by one.
Channeling the fractious multitudes is what she does, superbly, with “America, Who Hurt You?,” her new solo show at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. In it, she offers her own “multiracial and, I say this with love, somewhat dysfunctional family,” as she puts it, as a microcosmic example of American society.
“What is America if not one massive, multiracial, dysfunctional family?” she says. “And families feud. I mean, hopefully not to the point where they’re destroying each other. But you’re supposed to go to family counseling; you don’t just throw it all away.”
So Jones, whose other credits as a writer-performer include “Sell/Buy/Date,” puts the country on a therapist’s couch. Satirized as a vain and shallow adolescent glued to its golden smartphone, this imagined America is firmly prodded toward self-reflection — and, heaven forfend, empathy for its own people — by its alarmed older sibling, Britain.
“America, I love you,” Britain says with rigid propriety, “but you are at a frightful bottom — we believe you’re in complete denial, and this is a therapeutic intervention.”
Directed by Eric Ting for the National Black Theater and Theater for a New Audience, the show grew out of Jones’s podcast of the same name, and was co-commissioned by Oxford University, where it had its debut last spring. Jones, who updates the script in response to current events, calls the piece a work in progress. In its unevenness and slight bagginess, it seems that way, with a forced quality to the humor of the therapy scenes and to their arc.
But “America, Who Hurt You?” is interested in the trauma of Americans from different pockets of society and assorted generations, and in how such harm shapes their thoughts and feelings about their country. Embodying these people is where Jones excels, harnessing a kind of benevolent sorcery. One instant she’s one character, the next seamlessly another, each as solidly present as whoever was there just a second ago.
In telling the story of her family, Jones (on a tour-ready-looking set by Jiyoun Chang, and wearing a gray pinstripe suit by Toni-Leslie James) speaks both as herself and through characters inspired by her relatives.
They are charmers. Nereida, for example, who is Dominican and Puerto Rican, switches from Spanish into English as she enters. She tells the audience — no offense intended, just nervously making conversation — that it “feels very gentrified to be with you at your Shakespeare theater.” And Rashid, a Black man who stipulates up front, “I ain’t playing no trauma Olympics with nobody,” informs the white people in the room that they will need to fix the country’s mess.
An aberration is a white Southerner named Hank, who comes across as more manufactured than nuanced, a compilation of demographic factors. But then there is Lorraine, who fled the Holocaust with her family and is enduringly grateful to the United States for having given her refuge, and who defends Jones’s show to the other characters.
“You know she’s always been like this, trying to fix, and if only she can make people see all of us, then everyone can heal,” Lorraine says.
To represent “all of us” turns out to require cautiously tiptoeing across an artistic boundary that wasn’t really there in 2006. That’s when Jones won a special Tony Award for the solo show that made her name, “Bridge & Tunnel,” in which some immigrant characters come from backgrounds she doesn’t share.
It’s more fraught now for a performer to slip into other ethnic identities, but Jones does, with compassion and without presumptuousness. In a series of character cameos that skip across centuries, from the antebellum South to late 2020s California, the show seeks to acknowledge the depth of pain in the nation’s history. One of the most moving of these Americans is a gay man in 1980s Chicago, tending to his ailing mother, an immigrant from Japan. It’s a gentle interlude, subdued and haunting.
This show means to hold in its heart all of this country. It has yet to find its tonal balance, or acquire the heft that it needs to land more substantially. Like the nation, though, it’s still in a state of becoming. So we can hope.
America, Who Hurt You?
Through Oct. 4 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
