The Land of the Free Gets a Selective Therapy Session

Sarah Jones has earned deserved acclaim in recent decades for giving life, as both a writer and a performer, to a multitude of characters — male and female, old and young, and representative of a wide range of ethnicities, creeds, and perspectives. In her latest work, one of them is a vapid teenage girl who speaks in a singsong voice that makes her sound alternately overexcited and petulant, endlessly dropping the word “like” into her sentences.This is the title character of “America, Who Hurt You?,” and she’s in trouble. You see, the other nearly 200 countries in the world have decided her behavior is getting out of hand, and they’ve chosen the occasion of her 250th birthday to stage an intervention led, fittingly enough, by Britain, also personified here by Ms. Jones.“I was there when you were born,” Britain points out, adding, “By nation state standards, you are an adolescent…America, I love you, but you are at a frightful bottom—we believe you are in complete denial.”What follows is ostensibly a therapy session, though this roughly 100-minute piece, now running at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, in a co-production with National Black Theatre, is really more of a sermon. Ms. Jones seems to feel uniquely qualified to play the preacher. She’s from “a multiracial, multi-religious family” that is “somewhat dysfunctional,” she notes early on, speaking as herself. “What is America if not one massive, multiracial, dysfunctional family?”As you might expect, the members of that national family are depicted with varying degrees of attention and affection. If America as a whole is presented as a preening brat, and Britain as elegant but rather stuffy in her composure — she only loses it towards the end, while coming to terms with her own imperialist’s guilt —o ther Americans we meet in the play present an array of other caricatures, most of them executed with comic panache and palpable heart.Lorraine, an older woman, obviously Jewish, and Nereida, a fast-talking Latina, inform us they’re “loosely based” on Ms. Jones’s relatives. Then there’s Rashid, who as a black man feels “compelled to enter the chat” but insists, “I ain’t playing no trauma Olympics.” He doesn’t have to, because Ms. Jones suggests that racism, particularly against black and brown people, is our country’s biggest and most enduring problem.Any fair-minded person would, to be sure, concede that our nation’s treatment of black slaves and Native Americans, whose struggle is also duly recognized, constitute her original sin, and has shaped our historical trajectory in ways that continue to resonate and sting. And you don’t have to believe in open borders to see a racial component in recent, ugly battles concerning immigration. But Ms. Jones’s levels of both outrage and empathy prove selective, and her transparent political bias can produce snooty, dismissive clichés.For instance, only one character in “America” comes across as genuinely stupid and xenophobic, at least initially, and he is — you guessed it — white, male, and Christian. Hank lectures Ms. Jones and her various personae on their “woke gibberish” and “psychology mumbo jumbo.” Only towards the end is it revealed that he, too, is truly a victim, not of people who hate him simply for who he is, but of bad choices made by his family, involving booze, drugs, and, naturally, guns.Ms. Jones acknowledges the suffering of Irish and Japanese immigrants in the last century, offering an interview with a survivor of the internment camps and her gay son. Antisemitism, certainly a timely issue, gets relatively short shrift. Lorraine mentions in passing that some people “still don’t want Jews” in our country, and there’s a reference to some of her ancestors arriving in America on a ship after others were “lost.” But there’s no direct reference to the horrors of the Holocaust, or any prejudice they faced in their new home.In contrast, a gentle soul named Habiba, who emigrated from Jordan “by way of Palestine,” gets to bemoan the Balfour Declaration that laid the ground for Israel. She sadly observes, “Sarah Jones has relatives she loves, for whom just the word Palestine is disloyal,” whereas her grandson is “married to a nice girl who is half Christian, half Jewish.” If the implication here is that Jews are as a group less accepting of Palestinian or Islamic concerns than vice versa, I could suggest a few places for Habiba, or Ms. Jones, to visit in our country — college campuses or the Upper West Side, say—and even more outside of it.“America, Who Hurt You?” ends with a plea for unity and hope that conveniently doubles as a setup for a standing ovation — though based on her rapturous reception at a recent preview, Ms. Jones likely doesn’t need it. She asked the audience to rise and instructed us to breathe deeply and put our hands on our hearts, and then exited reciting the Declaration of Independence — a document beloved to her father, as we learn in one of the show’s more touching segments.“You are each your own unfinished revolution,” Ms. Jones gushed, as a few people seated near me beamed and in a couple of cases embraced. Mind you, they had been hissing and sneering at Hank just a short while earlier. But I suppose inclusivity has its limits, even among people who pride themselves on their open-mindedness.

The Land of the Free Gets a Selective Therapy Session

The Land of the Free Gets a Selective Therapy Session

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