AMERICA, WHO HURT YOU?
Written & Performed by: Sarah Jones
Directed by: Eric Ting
Where: Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY 11217
When: Now, until October 4th, 2026 (Extended!)
Presented by: National Black Theatre and Theatre for a New Audience, in association with Foment Productions and Jayson Jackson.
Tickets: $70–$98; Premium $125; $20 New Deal tickets for patrons 30 and under and full-time students.
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I saw America, Who Hurt You? on Wednesday, September 9, before its first public preview in New York. Sarah Jones told us that night that we were the first audience to see the show.
There is something special about experiencing a piece that way. Before the reviews. Before everyone starts talking about it. When it is simply an artist, the work, and a theater full of people receiving it for the first time.
I absolutely loved it.
America, Who Hurt You? is playing at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, home of Theatre for a New Audience. It was my first time in the theater, and when I walked into the space, the stage was almost entirely black. There were a few structural pieces, a stool, a camera, a microphone stand and a metal lectern.
And then there was SARAH JONES, her name glowing in bright lights.
Not the name of the show. Her name.
By the time the evening was over, that made perfect sense.
The one woman show… is that… but really, it’s not!
Jones comes onto the stage as herself and begins talking to us. But it does not take long before other people begin to arrive. People from her past, people she has encountered, people who carry pieces of America inside them. Different ages, cultures, backgrounds and points of view, all helping Jones wrestle with the question underneath the entire piece: Who are we and how did we get here?
I am deliberately not going to tell you much about who these characters are.
You need to meet them yourself.
There is an elderly woman who appears fairly early in the show, and when I tell you I could feel that woman’s skin, I mean it. You know how the skin of someone over 80 becomes thinner and softer? Somehow, sitting in that theater, I could feel it. I loved her so much.
That is how complete Sarah Jones’s transformation is.
Jones is a brilliant actress and writer, but even those words feel insufficient to describe what happens in front of you. She captures voices, but by “voices,” I do not simply mean accents. She captures how people speak, the words they choose, their rhythms, their pauses, their bodies, their movement, their history. Her face changes. Her body morphs. She gets wider, thinner, weaker, stronger…it’s mesmerizing to watch a person disappear, and suddenly someone completely different is standing in front of you.
Jones has been building this remarkable kind of performance for years. She won a Special Tony Award for her Broadway solo show Bridge & Tunnel, and more recently created Sell/Buy/Date. America, Who Hurt You? began as a podcast exploring the relationship between our political lives and our personal wounds, and Jones has now expanded that idea into a theatrical piece.
But this show is not simply an exhibition of how many people Sarah Jones can become.
All of these people are here for a reason.
They talk to us. They talk to one another. They talk to Sarah. Through them, she moves across time, generations and experiences, trying to understand America, not as an abstract idea, or as a country among other countries, but almost as a person.
And eventually, America actually becomes one.
I am going to be very careful here because I do not want to spoil how Jones gets us there.
At the heart of America, Who Hurt You? is a conversation between Great Britain and America, who is imagined as a young woman who also happens to be 250 years old. Which makes us… Gen Z … I think.
And Britain essentially looks at her and asks:
Girl, who hurt you?
and
Can we go to therapy!?
It is funny. It’s relatable. It’s sad.
But it is also beautiful.
Because suddenly this enormous conversation about a country becomes something intimate and recognizable. What would happen if, instead of immediately arguing about America, defending America, condemning America or trying to win an argument about America, we actually asked her what happened?
Who hurt you?
What did you inherit?
What are you still carrying?
And can we talk about it?
That is where this piece moved beyond being clever for me.
I could feel how much Sarah Jones cared about what she was sharing with us. I could feel her love. I could feel her hope.
And that matters, because America, Who Hurt You? is dealing with a country where so many of our conversations have become about choosing a side and shouting from it.
Jones has a point of view. This is not a politically neutral piece, nor should it be. But she is also interested in people, including the contradictions inside them. She allows different voices into the room and then asks us to listen.
Not necessarily agree.
Listen.
There is a difference.
And somewhere in that listening, she finds compassion without pretending that compassion means ignoring history, pain or responsibility.
She made me think. She made me tear up. She made me laugh. She made me breathe.
For 90 minutes, Jones creates a space where we can look at something that feels almost impossibly large and complicated, America, and make it human-sized again.
People can be hurt.
People can inherit things they did not create.
People can make terrible choices.
People can repeat what was done to them.
But people can also talk. People can listen. People can change.
Now read those lines again.
This time, replace the word people with America.
That is the exercise.
Because once Jones makes America human, the question shifts. Maybe a country can carry wounds. Maybe a country can inherit things it did not create. Maybe it can repeat what was done to it.
And maybe it can change too.
There is a line from Robert Frost’s poem A Servant to Servants that kept coming back to me afterward: “The best way out is always through.”
That feels like what Sarah Jones is asking us to consider.
Not around it.
Through it.
I hope Mayor Zohran Mamdani sees this play. I hope he talks about it. More than that, I would love to see the city find a way to get teenagers, high school students and college students into this theater.
I hope this piece can travel around the country. But Sarah Jones is one person, and what she does on that stage is uniquely hers. So I also hope someone is making a pro-shot of America, Who Hurt You? Because I want this piece to reach every state, every city and every classroom where people are trying to understand how we got here, how we talk to one another, and how we might find a way through.
Because there is something valuable happening here beyond a terrific performance.
This is a piece about how we look at a problem. How we listen to somebody whose experience is different from ours. How we talk about pain without allowing pain to be the end of the conversation. How we find compassion without pretending everything is okay.
And perhaps, somewhere inside all of that, how we find a way through.
If you are in New York City, please go see America, Who Hurt You?
If you can get here …come see it!
And if you can, maybe buy someone else a ticket, take them with you… pay it forward! Because this is the kind of work I hope people can experience together, then walk out of the theater and keep talking about.
Sarah Jones shared something beautiful with us that night.
I am grateful I got to be in the room.
And I absolutely loved it.
– Victoria Bert // @victoriabnyc