Sarah Jones’ Post-9/11 World

Listen Early in 2001, the writer and performer Sarah Jones started working on a one-woman Broadway show called Bridge and Tunnel. The play, which won a Tony Award, featured Jones playing a diverse cast of characters living in New York – including a middle-aged Pakistani man named Mohammed, a young Dominican woman named Nereida, and a Jewish grandmother named Lorraine.  
Jones started the play as an exploration of the lives of immigrants. After 9/11, she says the issues her characters faced only got more difficult.
In this Studio 360 exclusive performance, we’ve asked Jones to bring back these characters and others to talk about how America has changed since September 11.
“As a Dominican American it was a very confusing time, because the American part of me … I felt so vulnerable and very scared,” Nereida explains. “But then later the Dominican part of me was very upset that it felt like immigrants were being targeted. And then one of my uncles got sent to Iraq so basically every part of me was just like, ‘I can’t deal with this.'”
The closing monologue belongs to Jones’ character Miss Lady, an elderly woman of great dignity, long homeless on the streets of New York. “All we got to do is wake up out the old way and try something different for the next ten years,” she says. “At this point we ain’t hardly got nothing to lose anyway.”

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