A celebrated playwright has shifted from devotion to interrogation, and she staged the split. Sarah Jones says the long, personal allegiance she once felt to the United States soured, and she turned that disillusionment into a new solo work, America, Who Hurt You?, directed by Eric Ting and presented by National Black.
Jones traces the change to decades of lived experience and public reckonings. Raised in a multiracial, multi-religious family in Queens, New York, and educated at the United Nations School and Bryn Mawr College, she built a career that moved from slam poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe to social-justice theater at the Culture Project. Her first solo show, Bridge & Tunnel, reached Broadway with Meryl Streep as an executive producer and won a Tony Award, launching a string of high-profile roles and platforms, including a Unicef Goodwill ambassadorship, TED talks, and appearances at the White House and the World Economic Forum.
Those successes, Jones writes, once felt like proof that the country could live up to its promises. Over time, however, recurring exclusions and public backlashes eroded that faith. The rise of #MeToo, as Tarana Burke named it, exposed pervasive exploitation of women. The post-George Floyd period was followed by an anti-DEI, anti-woke backlash that revived racist rhetoric. Jones recalls violent and exclusionary slogans on the street, the targeting of immigrants and queer people, and threats to reproductive rights as moments that made patriotism feel less like affirmation and more like betrayal.
The 2024 election, Jones says, crystallized the rupture when a powerful, experienced Black woman failed to overcome a woefully inadequate white man. Against that backdrop, and after a CNN project never aired, she began developing America, Who Hurt You? to examine what grieving a nation looks like for people who believed deeply in its promise.
Jones frames the play as both confession and collective therapy, aimed at people who feel lost or afraid in their relationship to the country. She writes that raising these questions was necessary to show others they are not alone, and she invites New Yorkers to experience the work in the theater, which she still calls her land of the free and home of the brave.
Jones stops short of declaring the relationship irreparable, instead asking whether the country is willing to confront its history and do the work of repair. For now, she has turned private disillusion into public conversation on the stage.
