Women's work

Sarah Jones the activist undercuts Sarah Jones the artist on Women Can't Wait.

By Brad Rosenstein

A FEW SEASONS back, Sarah Jones presented excerpts from her solo show Surface Transit at Theater Artaud, revealing the glow of a true star in the making. Jones, an astonishing vocal and physical chameleon, often seems like Danny Hoch, Anna Deavere Smith, and Lily Tomlin rolled into one. Since that appearance, Jones's reputation has taken serious hold, and she packed the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum last week for four performances of her latest piece, Women Can't Wait! Commissioned by the international women's rights organization Equality Now and copresented locally by ODC Off-Site, Luminating Works, SpeakOut, and Center for the Arts, the piece allows us to eavesdrop on a group of eight women from around the world as they rehearse their testimonies for an address to the United Nations.

Utilizing only a scarf to mark her character changes, Jones uncannily incarnates the women through shifts in posture and affectation and a dizzying array of accents. Although the characters are fictitious, their plights are all too real, smashing into laws that often brutally discriminate against women. Praveen, an Indian woman who endured a lifetime of perfectly legal marital rape, is finally summoning the courage to speak out. Hala from Jordan saw her sister fall victim to an officially sanctioned "honor killing" by members of her own family, while Alma must watch her daughter's rapist become her daughter's husband in a move that will legally erase his crime in Uruguay.

The testimonies of Women Can't Wait! couldn't be more urgent, and the United States is certainly not exempt from the show's critical glare, which sheds light on our inadequate responses to domestic violence and the violence it begets. Given the show's dire subject matter, Jones and director Gloria Feliciano employ a surprisingly light touch. At its best, Jones's writing adds a human dimension to the painful cost of these laws, indicting not just the legal codes but also the societal norms that allow such arcane thinking to be perpetuated.

Yet despite its unimpeachable intentions, the piece is only fitfully effective as theater. It seldom resonates beyond its social message, employing the human stories primarily to illustrate its themes. In some cases the character outlines are pretty sketchy, relying more on Jones's virtuosic gifts as a performer than her skills as a dramatist to flesh out her points. I admire Jones the activist – who could argue with this piece's justifiable pain and anger? But unfortunately that clear-cut incontestability exacts a price, sacrificing the depth and ambivalence that makes the work of Jones the theater artist so rich and compelling.

The knock on Feiffer

Joan of Arc inaugurated the Aurora Theatre Company's new theater just months ago, and she's already back. Her first Aurora appearance was in George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan, but she's brought considerably closer to earth in Jules Feiffer's Knock Knock. The contrast between these two Joans is part of Feiffer's point. Abe (Dan Hiatt) and Cohn (Will Marchetti) are retirees who haven't left their log cabin in 20 years. Having settled into a predictably jejune existence, arguing over niceties of appearance versus reality, the two men are in serious need of having their world rocked.

Naturally that's what happens. Cohn's rash wishes bring in Wiseman (Sara Moore), an all-purpose vaudevillian trickster who upends the men's fragile logic, and then Joan herself (Rachel Brown), whose "voices" perhaps echo the men's own existential and absurd interior monologues. Liberating Joan from her saintly vocation, Cohn reduces her to a domestic drudge. This whimsical play has its moments, but I have to admit I've never been much of a fan of Feiffer's dry, sardonic humor. For me, this uneasy marriage of borscht-belt schtick, intellectual farce, and absurdist angst falls pretty flat.

Michael Butler, an adept director of difficult hybrids, seems strangely lost here, capturing the knockabout pace but desperately searching for a tone and a point. Hiatt and Marchetti find a specific comic physicality, but neither of these fine actors captures the New York Jewish ethos that is essential to Feiffer's work. Moore brings an invigorating spirit of Marx Brothers anarchy, but her schizoid lunacy is only put to superficial use. Brown does the finest work as the loopy Joan, but nothing quite hangs together in this scattershot evening. The play is such a mishmash of wisecracking non sequiturs that its final impact feels as lame as – well, a knock-knock joke.