Buy/Sell/Date

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a very entertaining one-woman show by Sarah Jones called Sell/Buy/Date.  I had learned about Sarah Jones when listening to an episode of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Magic Lessons podcast.  In it, she was telling Elizabeth about her current project – a comedic theatrical production about sex trafficking.  Because that sounds like a hoot, right?

It turns out that Sarah Jones is also a Tony and Obie award-winning performer.  Her previous one-woman show, called Bridge & Tunnel was produced by Meryl Streep.

On the podcast, Sarah was very witty and smart and made liberal use of her amazing facility for accents to create all sorts of different characters.  When I saw that she was performing locally, I enlisted a friend and we went!

This performance was of the project she had mentioned on the podcast.  It was a one-woman show about people affected by the sex industry.  I knew that she would be inhabiting a tremendous range of characters, but I had no idea what to expect as far as the storyline.

The story was smartly rendered under the conceit that she was a professor in the future who was presenting a lecture.  In the future imagined in this work, technology enables the presenter to become inhabited by the recorded testimonies of various individuals.

I’d like to consider the two components of the piece: 1) the highly researched and provocative subject matter; and 2) her virtuosic performance, separately.

Sarah’s performance was amazing.  If I had been listening only and not watching, I would not have believed for a moment that all of those characters were being performed by one person.  Even the “lead” character had an impeccable British accent, although Sarah is not. But the virtuosity of her performance was not restricted to her vocal delivery.  Her physicality and facial expressions were also tremendously effective.  It was fantastic the way that that this tall, graceful, and elegant woman could move around the stage in a manner that left no doubt that she was, at that moment, actually an older, overweight, and not particularly athletic man.

In terms of the subject matter – she very deftly presented a highly provocative subject in a very insightful, balanced, and scientific way. There was nothing prurient about it.  Based on comments that she made in the podcast, I would have expected a more overtly biased perspective.  But by presenting the topic with an almost clinical tone, she left the audience to sit with their own feelings and biases, forcing all of us to think about the topic more than if she had shown her hand.

I was certainly eager to have the opportunity to discuss the performance with my friend. For me the topic leads down a rabbit hole of relationship power dynamics. As we talked, unraveling the threads of what we had just watched, we realized that there wasn’t any bow to wrap things up with, just more questions.