In an extraordinary display of quick-hit characterizations, Sarah Jones cycles through almost twenty Americans, each with distinctly different accents, from widely different ethnic backgrounds, some even from different centuries, but almost all of them seem to have two traits in common: They like to argue, and they live with trauma.
“America’s trauma has always driven our politics, and our politics drive more trauma,” Jones, as herself, observes near the end of “America, Who Hurt You?” Her vividly populated solo show, although often droll, spends much of its 100 minutes presenting precisely the kind of stories that the Trump administration is currently trying to erase from the Smithsonian Institution, and everywhere else.
Unlike the Smithsonian, the history lessons that Jones presents on stage are not self-evidently the result of rigorous scholarly research. Yes, “America, Who Hurt You?” was commissioned by no less an academic institution than Oxford University, as part of its Unfinished Revolutions series, hooked to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Throughout the show, she and some of her characters recite the first words of that document (“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands…”) But “America, Who Hurt You?” is less a worked-out thesis than something more personal – reflecting Jones’ life, her talent, her politics and (we eventually realize) her patriotism. The show takes its title from a political podcast she began during the 2024 presidential election “when we thought perhaps sanity might prevail… and then, well, we all know how it’s turned out.”
Jones taps into her “very real, multiracial, multi-religious family” as inspiration for her most entertaining characters. among them her old Jewish relative Lorraine, and her “half Dominican, half Puerto Rican. all proud,” cousin Nereida, who takes one look out at the Theatre for a New Audience audience and says “Thank you for having me here. It’s feels very…gentrified to be with you at your Shakespeare Theater.”
The characters that loom largest, literally, are the nations America and Britain, who attempts a therapeutic intervention with the younger nation on behalf of most of the other 193 countries in the world, after they all engaged in a group chat. Britain attempts a timeline that, as Sarah Jones puts it, doesn’t ignore the reality of America’s actual history. “Not the sanitized, Instagram-feed curated version, but the…well, to put it in Epstein files terms: the still unreleased, unredacted list of America’s egregious offenses, one that names names and holds even powerful people to account.”
In a series of serious monologues, all projected in close-up, Jones portrays a slave woman used for breeding, a Irish immigrant who became a factory worker at age 10, a Japanese-American who was interned during World II and her son, who has never been able to come out as a gay man; an incarcerated Black man whose well-educated brother became conservative, disapproving and distancing himself from his family and all other Black people. There are several others as well, all with first names only, each of whom illustrate trauma and little else; any one of them might have benefited from a longer, deeper portrait.
Before the show began, an usher outside the auditorium pointed to a display that included an optional card to fill out – “Name a movement, gathering, or moment that is beautiful about America” – and two wicker chairs with “America the Beautiful” cushions festooned with some of the responses that audience members had already written. There was everything from the Knicks win bringing New Yorkers together to No Kings rallies to America’s rivers. It felt almost like a counterpoint to what unfolded on stage. Perhaps, depending on what happens in November, she can bring it all on stage in a sequel.
America, Who Hurt You?
Theater for a New Audience and National Black Theatre at Polonsky Shakespeare Center through October 4
Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $77-$105
Written and performed by Sarah Jones
directed by Eric Ting
Scenic and lighting design by Jiyoun Chang, costume design by Toni-Leslie James, sound design by Palmer Hefferan, projection design by Stefania Bulbarella, property supervision by Thomas Jenkeleit
Photos by HanJie Chow
