Solo theatrical performances are like ads. Everyone claims to hate them but nevertheless finds the good ones irresistible. A good ad acts like a tonic, making a new idea easy to swallow. But if we're not sold on the appeal in thirty seconds, we turn it off. The undercurrent of solo shows tends to be advertising: has-been celebrities namedropping through tell-all monologues, aging wunderkinder trying to fire up stalled me-machines with shallow autobiographical monologues. It's partly because we know how easily the genre is poisoned by egomania that we cherish those with the imagination and discipline to use the poison therapeutically, turning the form into an exquisite critique of ego itself.

There have never been many who could pull this off--maybe a dozen or two across the twentieth century, when the genre burgeoned. Anna Deavere Smith, Danny Hoch and Lily Tomlin are among the few living ones: virtuosic mimics and also penetrating social critics who use themselves as documentary cameras and editorializing mirrors. They negotiate the dicey line between mimicry and mockery partly by dint of fascination with details. It's the details that distinguish this sort of talent from that of the ordinary standup or sketch comic. Such performers have an intimacy with and affection for the people they imitate that a mere jester doesn't. We may laugh at their impersonations, but we recognize the critical instinct behind their acts of observation.

Add to this exclusive company a relative newcomer who has just returned to the New York scene after a Hollywood detour that could easily have destroyed her. Sarah Jones is a 29-year-old whose first big break was winning the 1997 Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Championship. The solo show she developed at Nuyorican, Surface Transit, was in a class by itself at the PS 122 "Hip-Hop Theater Festival," where it played in 2000, later moving to American Place Theater. In it, Jones--a tall, strong, slender, dark-skinned woman of mixed-race parentage--portrayed, among others, an elderly, narrow-minded Jewish busybody, a Russian-immigrant widow of an American soldier, a bigoted Italian-American male cop, an unemployed British actress and blazing young rappers of both sexes, all with meticulous precision and merciless humor.

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