It’s hard to knock a solo performer who headlines to packed houses at age 29, especially when Meryl Streep has called her “a member of the tribe.” But Streep’s blessing can only get you to the Village; it takes audiences to land you on Broadway, where Sarah Jones just finished her eight-week run at the Helen Hayes Theater. The people have spoken: Sarah Jones is good as hell.
A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Jones came onto the New York slam poetry scene at the Nuyorican Poets Café, but she made a name for herself in 2001, with “Your Revolution,” her feminist hip-hop song. The song was censored by the Federal Communications Commission (for its anti-chauvinist lyrics, ironically enough) until Jones sued and won, scoring fame and fandom along the way.
Set at the fifth annual I.A.M.A.P.O.E.T.O.O. poetry showcase (don’t ask what it stands for), Bridge and Tunnel, Jones’ third solo play, is a showcase of what she does best: characters. Though each of her fourteen characters experiences a host of difficulties in this country, what is most profound is not their suffering, but their thick-skinned humor.
Otherness in America is not a new story. What’s new is Jones’ ability to perform such a political play without seeming preachy or heavy-handed. The showcase is hosted by Muhammad Ali, a Pakistani Muslim with a penchant for bad jokes. Intermittently, he is interrupted by calls from his anxious wife, who shares the news: the government insists on performing a “background check” on him. It’s tacit, but we get the point: Ali is no terrorist.
We are reminded that such xenophobia is nothing new for immigrant Americans as the play moves directly from Muhammad to Loriane Levine, Jones’ spot-on Eastern European arthritic Jewish grandmother from Long Island. This juxtaposition reminds the audience that now-staple figures of “American culture” (think: Mike Myers’ Coffeetalking Linda Richman on SNL) were once considered dirty immigrants themselves.
From Levine, Jones transforms into Bao, a twenty-something Vietnamese American who angrily insists that his poem is not about “crouching tiger and hidden drycleaner, or rice, or flowering lotuses.”
The audience gasped as Jones transitioned from her high-pitched 11-year old Latina girl to Monique, a sultry performance artist from Australia by way of Brooklyn. Jones became Juan Jose, a Mexican-American worker relegated to a wheelchair, and Boris, an elderly Russian man. Jones doesn’t just ‘do voices;’ she embodies people. With every prop she dons to signify a new character, her six-foot tall frame seemed to morph in front of our eyes.
Perhaps the most moving character is Mrs. Ling, a Chinese-American woman from Flushing, who speaks from behind thick glasses about coming to terms with her daughter’s lesbianism. Jones’ six-foot frame seems to shrink down as she conveys, in a perfect Chinese accent, her deep struggle with her daughter’s own “foreign” lifestyle.
One gets the feeling that Rashid, a black hip-hop performer who is the only non-immigrant character, is a stand-in for Jones herself. He uses self-deprecating humor to connect with the mostly immigrant crowd: “Black people, you know what I’m saying, we get imported, you get deported.” He even throws in a terrorist joke: “Obama. See, our man is only one consonant away from being a terrorist.”
Though some critics will inevitably contend that the play is a tad naïve and a is reminiscent of an ACLU ad, the fact remains that Jones is a great talent, and her characters have resonance. Bridge and Tunnel reminds us that our identities, too, were hyphenated before we became Americans.
