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Surface Transit is Worth Commuting To

© Eugenia E. Gratto

The play should be starting, but the house lights have not gone down yet, and the audience grows restless. And then she arrives. A homeless woman, laden with shopping bags, making her way down the right side of the American Film Institute Theater at the Kennedy Center, muttering about the people who pass her on the street and the rudeness of audience members who won't respond to a simple "How are you?"

So begins Surface Transit, produced by D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, which runs at the AFI Theatre through April 21. For ticket information, call 202-393-3939 or visit the Woolly Mammoth's website.

The one-woman show takes snapshot glimpses of seven characters, book-ended by a beginning and ending monologue delivered by the homeless woman, in modern-day New York City. Sarah Jones, who wrote the script and performs the play, uses taut body language and dead-on accents to portray the characters. Jones makes small costume changes between each vignette, and one point, she lets her braids down from their ponytail, but otherwise she relies entirely on expression, voice and body to show each character.

Jones plays an incredibly convincing elderly person, whether that is when she is playing the homeless woman or the racist Jewish grandmother who has disowned her gay son. Even without the benefit of makeup to age her, her hands tremor and her back bows in ways that could be cliché, but never cross that line.

The final two characters before the homeless woman closes out the show turn to territory Jones is very familiar with. The first of the two, Rasheed, a rhyming addict, speaks a serious poem punctuated by humorous asides. The second of the two, a college freshman and aspiring poet, delivers Jones' own, FCC-banned poem "Your Revolution Will Not Happen Between These Thighs."

Jones' background is varied, but includes time as a spoken word performer in New York. She attended Bryn Mawr College where she was the recipient of the Mellon Minority Fellowship, then returned to New York and began performing, eventually winning the Nuyorican Poets Café's 1997 Grand Slam Championship and working with such artists as Paul Simon, Derek Walcott and Gil Scott-Heron.

Surface Transit is a Drama Desk award-nominated solo show, and has been presented at PS122, the American Place Theatre, and at HBO's Aspen Comedy Arts Festival where it won the Best One Person Show award, 2000 after touring internationally.

There are some difficulties with the show. The final monologue as the homeless woman leaves is awfully preachy, and the scene with the college freshman does play more as a vehicle for the poem than a cohesive piece. But these things are far outweighed by the talented actress and writer who makes the audience's willing suspension of disbelief happen without effort. And the seamless way each piece connects to the other—think of it as eight degrees of separation—is truly fascinating.

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