By Sarah Hoenicke for BUST.com
Playwright-performer Sarah Jones “plays with the spaces between” questions about self-creation for her one-woman shows, Surface Transit (2000), Tony award-winning Bridge & Tunnel (2004, produced by Meryl Streep), and Sell/Buy/Date (2016). Jones slips seamlessly into character during her shows, donning their props and accents: elderly Jewish Lorraine; soft-spoken Lakota Gary; fast-talking feminist Bella; and many others.
Her most recent play, Sell/Buy/Date, came about in part due to experiences she had performing for audiences that weren’t her “usual well-heeled Broadway” crowd, and which caused her to think about stories she wasn’t hearing.
“Sell/Buy/Date is about human beings eking out an existence any way they can,” Jones told me in our phone interview. “It’s about women’s empowerment, questions of sex and sexuality, and commercialization of sexual exploitation of women.”
Jones is perhaps the first honest realization of Whitman’s boast of containing multitudes. Except she doesn’t contain them. Their existence isn’t contradictory or parenthetical to her own. She’s created these people fully — with individual ticks, accents, mannerisms. They seem to live beside her, entering her life (and our lives) at will.
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