‘If we’re unhealthy, it is a reflection of an unhealthy democracy’: Sarah Jones puts America on the therapy couch

“We’re in a timeline that even Margaret Atwood, George Orwell or Octavia Butler would be like, ‘Y’all jumped the shark on this one,” the Tony award-winning playwright Sarah Jones says pointedly.

This incredulity towards the state of the US inspired Jones to create America, Who Hurt You? a podcast launched in 2024 where Jones interviewed diverse experts on immigration, climate change and the manosphere, among many other topics. Jones was petrified by her impression that America was on, as she emphasizes, “death’s door”. Her aim was to put the nation on the therapy couch, and she has now transformed the acclaimed podcast to an off-Broadway one-woman play written by and starring Jones herself.

I saw America, Who Hurt You? on a recent dreary Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn on a day where my mind was already inundated with worries over rising gas prices, global warming woes in California, and the upcoming November midterms. The interrogative title of the production stumped me because I didn’t know how to answer. Where should we look first? Which direction? Who would give testimony to this nation’s woes? Jones explores these questions twofold. For 100 minutes without interruption, she plays a dazzlingly wide range of characters inspired by her own multiracial lineage – a Jewish grandmother with Holocaust survival trauma, a Latina New Yorker watchful over urban gentrification, a Blackfoot and Lakota man reeling from land loss, a conservative white, male nationalist. She disappears into a total of 19 characters, with an aim to expose the social and psychological tension within American society writ large. One might assume that many characters played by one woman would run the risk of surface-level characterizations. Yet Jones moves with fluidity, giving each character room to breathe.

Jones says that the play is the hardest project that she has tackled in her 30-year career. Rising from the ranks of the New York spoken word scene in the mid-90s, Jones’s performances have combined wit and social commentary through her one-woman shows of the early aughts before she transitioned to Broadway. In 2004’s Bridge and Tunnel, Jones played a multiracial host of New Yorkers in order to center the immigrant experience (the show was produced by Meryl Streep, who said that the artist “changes before your very eyes”). After receiving a commission in 2025 from Oxford University to examine America through a contemporary lens, she worked with the National Black Theatre and her company, Foment Productions, to create this production which is running until 4 October before showing at New York’s Under the Radar Festival in January.

Her director, Eric Ting, praises Jones for being able to hold a “multitude inside a body”, which lets her characters “arrive whole, unhurried and unmocked”. Yet America, Who Hurt You? is also an interactive in-person experience that aims to break through what Jones calls the “illusion” of online connection. Jones announces to the audience before the play officially begins that the show is not for passive spectatorship. Every attender will have an active role within this story, in a reflection of her belief that everyone must pitch in to steer America in a more constructive direction. Towards the end of the show, Jones 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-and-out in unison. It was an unusual yet affirmative ending that reinforced how connected I was to the strangers surrounding me.

Self-awareness is often considered to be the foundation for recognizing harm, and the first step in repairing that damage and bringing about lasting change. It is a belief that is spoken about as much in therapy as throughout activist circles. Through America’s psychotherapy onstage and scrutiny towards Jones’s own family history, the performer simultaneously reveals individuals’ struggle and the larger forces behind them. “Repair,” Jones says, “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.

Jones is reactive to the current news cycle by changing the playscript in real-time. She says that the flexibility has allowed her to shed her perfectionism. “All I can do is let the characters live. They have to respond to what’s happening.” If Jones is a vessel for a multi-pronged portrait of the United States, then America, Who Hurt You? demands that we learn from one another as key contributors to the survival of the country.

America, Who Hurt You? is at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, New York, until 4 October and at Under the Radar festival, New York, from 6 to 24 January 2027

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