Sarah Jones' Reality Theater

Ghetto daffodils: That's what Sarah Jones sees. Some people walk through neighborhoods like Manhattan's Washington Heights, populated by poor Dominican migrants in gloomy high-rises, and they see blight. Jones instead notices people like Yajaira Hernandez, one of a kaleidoscope of characters she conjures in her latest one-woman show, "Bridge & Tunnel."

Yajaira is a fifteen-year-old, first generation immigrant from the Dominican Republic. On stage Jones morphs into the young woman, with a fast-talking Dominican accent and gum-popping bounce. The show is a fantasy open mic night in Queens, and Yajaira recites a poem. "The name of it is called 'Midnight in Harlem Feels Like Noon,'" Yajaira begins, haltingly, trying to wrap her multilingual tongue around the King's rigid English. "I know the title is a little bit esoterical. But you can just like take it home with you and just ruminate."

midnight ghetto daffodil

like the ones in the poems about Spring, right?

Nah . . . she dips and sways with breezes

bullet raindrops

forecast for her red-brick hi-rise

is mostly crowded. . . .

Jones has the sort of textured love affair with urban environs that we rarely see today. Because of her style -- a character artist doing poignant, comedic skits -- many compare her work to that of people like Lily Tomlin and early Whoopi Goldberg. She shares their sharp progressive wit and is making a name for herself as heir to their feminist performance-art thrones. But what's most striking about Jones is her romance with unvarnished urbanity -- an appreciation for fully human portraits of city life, warts and beauty marks alike, that is more commonly associated with artists like Spike Lee and Richard Pryor.

Jones abandons progressive pathos for honest humanity. We are meant to laugh at the immigrants and black folks she portrays as often as we cry for them. >From their accents and their bungled English to their often off-kilter understanding of American culture, her characters represent the hodgepodge of sights and sounds that make up a place as diverse as Queens. "There are some people who cringe as soon as I start speaking because their context on accents on an immigrant is negative," says Jones, riffing in her own rapid-fire diction. "What a terrible thing that we've been conditioned to immediately respond to certain people's accents as demeaning or embarrassing. As the kid of a family that has immigrants in it, I know there's a long history of people saying, 'Get rid of your accent' -- well, unless of course you're British, in which case you're dignified. So what are all these value judgments that are attached to our supposed warts?"

Jones wants her audiences to question these values and to consider what role they play in cementing America's race, gender, and class hierarchies. But rather than railing against the powers-that-be, she subtly illustrates how our common fight against them binds us. A rich Haitian homebuyer recounts the racism she endures from her realtor; a working class East European Jew, who is not at all comfortable with her grandson's love of hip hop ("Now he wants me to call him Funkmaster Sherovsky," she gripes), remembers getting the same sort of welcome seventy years ago.

This is Jones's fourth show. She has performed for the United Nations, depicting women around the world facing discrimination. She toured India, performing an early version of "Bridge & Tunnel." Her acclaimed debut show, "Surface Transit," blended the lives of a cast of characters trying to make it in New York City, from a bigoted Italian cop to a Caribbean immigrant auditioning for MTV.

All of this work has been overtly political and, not coincidentally, largely outside the mainstream. That's something Jones is sick of. But she's finally starting to get noticed by showbiz's big names -- and big money. Meryl Streep is producing "Bridge & Tunnel" and is among Jones's loudest backers. Jones is also talking with Bravo about a new television series.