“Bridge & Tunnel” closes March 12. Today is January 27, which gives you six weeks and two days to catch the best new play on Broadway. Shrewdly crafted and expertly performed, Sarah Jones’s one-woman panorama of immigrant life is easily the most vibrant show in town.

The multiethnic Ms. Jones, long considered one of the pre-eminent young spoken word performers, seizes the Helen Hayes Theatre stage as if it were built for her. Director Tony Taccone uses her lanky body, supple alto, and hard-to-pin-down ethnicity to masterful effect; between them, they transform Ms. Jones’s 15 characters into a rich, boisterous, and enormously touching ensemble.

The closest corollary to her efforts is probably Lily Tomlin’s “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” Both start off with a truth-telling homeless woman, and both use characters of wide-ranging ages, genders, and creeds. “Bridge & Tunnel” is less ambitious in some ways – Ms. Jones almost never caroms back and forth between characters, as Ms. Tomlin did so impressively. But her setting, a poetry reading by and for the city’s immigrants “in the heart of beautiful South Queens,” al lows her speakers their own awkward hesitations and tiny victories.

Starting with the evening’s master of ceremonies, a hapless accountant from Pakistan named Mohammed Ali (“Please, you can save all the jokes about the boxing”), few of the participants are entirely comfortable in the spotlight, a fact that Ms. Jones and Mr. Taccone illustrate through tiny but telling character flourishes. The sympathetic discomfort one feels at their fumbling English and anxious body language places the audience in a similar position – until the speakers begin to illustrate just how universal their concerns are.

Habiba Rahal, a middle-aged Jordanian woman with a sly sense of humor, remembers writing romantic Beatles lyrics on the sleeves of her jilbab as a teenager. As she can attest, the stories that often linger longest are stories of love, and despite Mohammed’s best efforts to keep the evening upbeat, a deep vein of sadness courses through nearly all the poems. A Mexican union organizer in a wheelchair recites a devastating poem about loving and losing a fellow migrant. Love is a source of bitterness for a Williamsburg hipster and a source of anxiety for Yajaira, an 11-year-old Dominican girl:

“I don’t want to grow up
All my friends think I’m strange
I don’t want to get older
Because that’s when things change”

Even when these characters don’t agree with or even necessarily understand one another, Ms. Jones gives a marvelous sense of them interacting. The community shown here is a fairly tight-knit one, and one senses that many of these men and women know one another’s foibles well. More important, they respond in surprising ways to the outpourings of emotion. As Habiba puts it, “You are all wearing your words on your sleeves tonight … and that is wonderful.”

It is no mystery why Meryl Streep has loudly and frequently sung the praises of the chameleonic Ms. Jones. Yes, her accents and postures are beautifully defined – she does amazing things with her shoulders – but the smaller details are even more impressive. Watch how Mohammed consistently forgets in which pocket he has put his lineup of performers. (Poor Mohammed is the kind of guy who needs to end his jokes with “Seriously, folks” to make it clear that he just told a joke.) Or how an elderly Jewish woman named Lorraine gingerly lowers herself into a chair, feeling for the seat with one trembling hand, before delivering an excerpt from her opus “No, Really, Please, Don’t Get Up.” Or how young Yajaira takes comfort in her sing songy delivery whenever her words threaten to overwhelm her.

Finest of all is Ms. Jones’s exquisite rendering of Mrs. Ling, a timid Chinese woman in her early 40s who periodically needs to consult her index cards while speaking. Unlike many of the other immigrants depicted, Mrs. Ling is not entirely convinced that the American way of life is an improvement over the old one. Ms. Jones patiently adds layer upon layer to Mrs. Ling’s emotional maturation, depicted as a struggle between firmly ingrained cultural traditions and deep, life-changing familial love:

When my daughter was five years old, she bring me a big picture of the family she draw in school, she was crying, saying the kids make fun of her. The picture she draw had so many people: not only me, her dad, her brother, it had cousins, uncles, neighbors, friends, bus driver, mailman, everybody she know, maybe like 50 people. It must take her all day to draw that. She said the kids make fun because they said her family is too many people. I told her don’t worry, she is right. Because family is not only mom and dad, it’s everybody you love like family.

By this logic, Sarah Jones has created the best kind of family in “Bridge & Tunnel.” Despite (and to some degree because of) their lame jokes, their affectations, their untested prejudices, and their halting English, she clearly loves these 15 men and women. And she has devoted her seemingly limitless interpretive gifts to making sure we hear them, notice them, and take the tentative but sometimes difficult steps toward understanding them. Love, she seems certain, will come in time.

Until March 12 (240 W. 44th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).