Tony award-winning playwright Sarah Jones has transformed her acclaimed podcast into an off-Broadway one-woman play, America, Who Hurt You?, in which she plays 19 characters over 100 minutes to explore the social and psychological tensions within American society.
Jones, who says the play is the hardest project of her 30-year career, was inspired by her belief that the US is on "death's door" and her aim to put the nation on the therapy couch. The play draws on her own multiracial lineage, featuring characters including a Jewish grandmother with Holocaust survival trauma, a Latina New Yorker watchful over urban gentrification, a Blackfoot and Lakota man reeling from land loss, and a conservative white male nationalist.
From podcast to stage
The podcast, launched in 2024, featured Jones interviewing diverse experts on immigration, climate change and the manosphere. The play, written by and starring Jones, runs until 4 October at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in New York before showing at the Under the Radar Festival in January.
Jones rose from the New York spoken word scene in the mid-90s, and her 2004 show Bridge and Tunnel centred the immigrant experience through a multiracial host of New Yorkers. She received a commission in 2025 from Oxford University to examine America through a contemporary lens, and worked with the National Black Theatre and her company, Foment Productions, to create the production.
Interactive experience
Director Eric Ting praises Jones for being able to hold a "multitude inside a body", which lets her characters "arrive whole, unhurried and unmocked". The play is also interactive, with Jones announcing before the show that it is not for passive spectatorship. Towards the end, she instructs the audience to hug the person next to them or give a look of acknowledgment before placing a head over the heart and breathing in unison.
Jones is reactive to the current news cycle, changing the playscript in real time. "All I can do is let the characters live. They have to respond to what's happening," she says. "Repair," she adds, "is personal and political, just like the rest of the country. If we're running around all unhealthy, it is a reflection of an unhealthy democracy."
The takeaway of the play, Jones believes, will depend on each audience member's own relationship to how they have been harmed and what they will need to move forward.
