Another master of the solo show, Sarah Jones follows up on her Broadway hit Bridge and Tunnel with Sell/Buy/Date, a one-person play about sex and sexual politics, directed by Carolyn Cantor. Jones, who is both a writer and performer, approaches her themes from a feminist position but doesn’t lecture or rant. “When people come to the theatre, I want to provoke thought and laughter, not prescribe what they should think,” she explains in a program note. In Sell/Buy/Date, which comes to the Geffen after a 2016 run at off-Broadway’s Manhattan Theater Club, Jones impersonates a slew of characters ranging from a Jewish grandmother to an ex-pimp to a college freshman paying for her education by working in a strip club. Jones not only captures their voices but their body language; the result is more than mimicry, it is three-dimensional life itself. The emphasis is on the male manipulation and exploitation of sex in our time, which Jones looks back on from a futuristic vantage point, posing as a pedantic professor tracking “recent cultural shifts.” Pornography, sex trafficking, sexuality and female empowerment are explored in Jones’s brilliant, multi-voiced monologue. A social activist as well as a theater artist—she won the 2017 Mental Health Award for innovation in the arts and previously served as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador—Jones is not only informed and passionate about gender issues but is able to flesh them out in a theatrical, bitter-sweet way that entertains from beginning to end.
