The reviews are in for America, Who Hurt You?, the solo show Sarah Jones has brought to the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where National Black Theatre and Theatre for a New Audience are presenting it through October 4. Jones plays close to twenty Americans across three centuries — relatives, immigrants, an incarcerated man, a white Christian father from Georgia — and then puts the country itself on a therapist’s couch as a phone-addicted teenager, with Britain as the older sibling staging the intervention. Critics are united on the performance and divided on the play around it: the notices admire Jones’s range and her refusal to caricature anyone, while several find the therapy framing forced and the closing argument short on specifics.
The verdict: nine notices in, and the praise for Sarah Jones herself is unanimous — every critic here describes the same feat of quick-change characterization, and several reach for Anna Deavere Smith to place it. Only three of the nine publish a rating at all, and those three run from three stars to five, an average of 3.8 out of 5. The split is over the writing rather than the playing: the warmer notices take Jones at her word that the piece is a work in progress and enjoy it as one, while The New York Times, Vulture, New York Stage Review and The Front Row Center all find the therapy-session frame baggy and the argument harder to pin down than the people inside it.
What are critics saying about America, Who Hurt You?
The New York Times
“Sarah Jones Plays the Melting Pot”
Reviewer: Laura Collins-Hughes
“Directed by Eric Ting for the National Black Theater and Theater for a New Audience, the show grew out of Jones’s podcast of the same name, and was co-commissioned by Oxford University, where it had its debut last spring. Jones, who updates the script in response to current events, calls the piece a work in progress. In its unevenness and slight bagginess, it seems that way, with a forced quality to the humor of the therapy scenes and to their arc.”
Read Laura Collins-Hughes’s full review in The New York Times
Vulture
“Her amiable New Yorkers have tougher things to say to each other than ever before.”
Reviewer: Jackson McHenry
“Her point — that the nation needs to reckon with its true history to move forward — is both true and overfamiliar, as are the hard facts she presents her America with. Britain tells America she needs to consider her national experience starting not at 1776 but 1492 (very Howard Zinn) and that we note the importance of 1619, when slaves first arrived on the continent (borrowing from the Times project). If these points are meant to challenge the character of America that Jones portrays onstage, they’re pretty much already scripture to her friendly Brooklyn theatergoing audience, which drains America, Who Hurt You?’s potency.”
TheaterMania
“Theatre for a New Audience and the National Black Theatre bring Sarah Jones back to the New York stage.”
Reviewer: Zachary Stewart
“Jones is up there with Anna Deavere Smith and Jefferson Mays as an actor who can instantly leap from character to character in a believable way using just her voice and a few specific physical gestures. Her power is undiminished from her one Broadway credit, and in many ways has matured.”
New York Stage Review
“Sarah Jones returns with new and old characters to stage an intervention for a troubled nation”
Reviewer: Michael Sommers
“Much of this sad but true U.S. history—accompanied by TED talk–style timeline graphics presenting years such as 1776, 1619, and 1492—likely will prove familiar to the adult demographic who attend productions at TFANA. Trying not to wave an admonishing finger, Jones delivers platitudinous observations (“You can’t pretend that good is all that exists and ignore the rest”) with all the considerable talent and empathy she can muster as an artist, but stretches of her material are scarcely revelatory, let alone stirring or memorable.”
The Front Row Center
Reviewer: Tulis McCall
“Jones brings the story to a close, warning us that we are close to the edge of our own existence unless we collectively take action. She asks us to rise and hold our own tender hearts and remember that we CAN do something. If we look and LISTEN to one another.”
“I would have liked more specificity. Jones raises so many questions and delivers so many truths that the message becomes murky. Who did hurt America? I don’t know – all of us maybe?”
1 Minute Critic
“The world has a group chat about America, and Sarah Jones brings the whole family to respond”
Reviewer: Matthew Wexler
“Jones, who won a special Tony Award for her solo show Bridge & Tunnel 20 years ago, continues to unpack, then piece together our shared humanity. To try to articulate the depth of her precision—in voice, body, and lived experience—feels like a disservice to the artist and Eric Ting’s sharp direction. It must be experienced.”
TheaterScene.net
“A dazzling solo performance in which Sarah Jones becomes a chorus of voices, turning history, humor, and empathy into an electrifying theatrical encounter.”
Reviewer: Tony Marinelli
“Sarah Jones has spent two decades turning the one-person show into an exercise in theatrical multiplication. In America, Who Hurt You?, she fills the Polonsky Shakespeare Center with a sprawling collection of personalities who seem to have wandered in from different corners of the country, different generations, and, occasionally, different centuries. There are relatives, immigrants, elders, skeptics, patriots, malcontents, and people simply trying to figure out what happened to the country they inhabit. Directed by Eric Ting, the production is at once comic, intimate, intellectually restless, and unmistakably built around Jones’ extraordinary ability to make a single body feel inhabited by many.”
Theater Pizzazz
Sarah Jones Excels in “America, Who Hurt You?”
Reviewer: Ron Fassler
“On a nearly bare stage (a raised platform, a screen for a backdrop and, off to the side, a video on a tripod), Jones once again brilliantly embodies more than a dozen men and women emotionally, physically, and vocally. Her ability to go from one to the other is a practiced art; one that she does with enormous subtlety and never in a grandstanding manner. She simply inhabits one character to the next, whether it be Lorraine, an elderly Jewish woman, or Rashid, a self-proclaimed “Black dude,” and even a gay Japanese man. She plays them all earnestly, never in parody and, it would appear, embraces them all as equals. No one is ever talked down to.”
New York Theater
Reviewer: Jonathan Mandell
“America’s trauma has always driven our politics, and our politics drive more trauma,” Jones, as herself, observes near the end of “America, Who Hurt You?” Her vividly populated solo show, although often droll, spends much of its 100 minutes presenting precisely the kind of stories that the Trump administration is currently trying to erase from the Smithsonian Institution, and everywhere else.
Production photographs by HanJie Chow.
America, Who Hurt You? began as a podcast Sarah Jones started during the 2024 election and was co-commissioned by Oxford University for its Unfinished Revolutions series, marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence; it had its first outing there last spring. The New York staging is a co-production between National Black Theatre and Theatre for a New Audience, directed by Eric Ting, with scenic and lighting design by Jiyoun Chang, costume design by Toni-Leslie James, sound design by Palmer Hefferan and projection design by Stefania Bulbarella. Jones rewrites as the news moves, so the show a reader sees next week will not be quite the one these critics saw.
America, Who Hurt You? runs at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, through Sunday October 4, 2026. It runs 100 minutes with no intermission.
