Sarah Jones has become one of my favourite performers. She seamlessly flips from one character to another and make them interesting and relatable.
“Sarah and her work are celebrated for their humanitarian approach to character and story through the lens of multiculturalism” (Sarah Jones Online).
Known as a Solo performer and only a solo performer she uses her multi-cultural background and knowledge to create interesting and relatable characters while also using them to tell a humanitarian message.
She introduces every performance as herself making the audience aware of who she is and what her background is. Her most well known theatre performance was her show Bridge & Tunnel which was produced by Meryl Streep and became a hit on Broadway. Her work has been commissioned all over the US and has appeared on US television shows both as a performer and as herself. She also has her own show “The Sarah Jones Show” which airs on Bravo.
She is currently as UNICEF Goodwill ambassador and features a lot of humanitarian messages within her work.
Notable performances are her shows Surface Transit (1998) and Bridge & Tunnel (2004) with her most recent work being Sell/Buy/Date at New York Live Arts (6th-16th January 2016). About creating the characters for SBD she says in an article of the Examiner, “All of my characters are composites of real people I’ve met, interviewed, read about, or seen in other media” (Examiner, 2016). She also said during this article that this show was about “find[ing] the humor and truth and beauty in some of the most challenging topics of our time” (ibid).
The New York Times describes her as “an unlicensed anthropologist, an explorer of the cultural fault lines that unite and divide the city” (New York Times, 2011) and indeed they may be right. Jones goes out into the city when trying to create new characters to gather new accents, body language and opinions. It is stated above that she creates her characters based on real people she meets or see’s and this is the best way to gain and create a truthful interpretation.
Check out her website: http://sarahjonesonline.com/
Hopkins, T. (2016) See Sarah Jones in her new show Sell/Buy/Date in New York City. Examiner. [online] 6 January. Available at: http://www.examiner.com/article/see-sarah-jones-her-new-show-sell-buy-date-new-york-city [Accessed on 15 April 2016]
Leland, J. (2011) Scouting the City for Her Characters. The New York Times. [online] 19 August. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/nyregion/sarah-jones-playwright-scouting-the-city-for-her-characters.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [Accessed on 15 April 2016]