Stage beauty: Sarah Jones is a smash in Bridge & Tunnel, her solo show celebrating immigrants including gay binational couples.

In her hit Broadway solo show, Bridge & Tunnel, a fresh look into the American melting pot, the brilliant performer and writer Sarah Jones becomes an anxious Pakistani accountant, a Mexican construction worker, and a sweet doofus of a New York DJ. And those are just the men. By evening's end Jones has morphed into all sorts of folks from all kinds of cultures who share their American dreams in an onstage poetry slam.

Jones, offstage a happily married heterosexual, gets special queer props in the show for her portrait of a Chinese mom who absorbs the news that her daughter is gay, stops nagging about the traditional wedding, and starts campaigning to help her daughter's girlfriend stay in the United States.

Often compared to that other great shape-shifting monologuist, Lily Tomlin, Jones has wowed the critics like nobody since. She also found a fan and supporter in Meryl Streep, who helped produce Bridge & Tunnel's off-Broadway run in 2004. And in May, nearly 30 years after the divine Lily won a special Tony award for work deemed too singular to be judged in competition, Jones was awarded a special Tony of her own.

Did other people start erupting out of you when you were little, or what?

Yeah. [Laughs] I was a little volcano.

Do you remember the first time? What happened?

As a kid, I was aware--probably not unlike a lot of kids and definitely not unlike many of The Advocate's readers--of what it means to be somewhat of an outsider. I remember being told I couldn't do certain things because I wasn't a boy, being stared at when I walked down the street with my mother because her white skin was weird compared to my brown skin. I remember feeling that there was some center someplace but that I was definitely at the margin. I think something about that, in combination with my being exposed to a lot of different backgrounds from the time I was little, started this collection of identities inside me.

I get it.

Early on I started to develop an affinity for other people and their stories and the connections that I made between their struggle and my own. I've been a struggling person since I was little. [Laughs] Things have been weighing on my mind since I was very, very small.

Where were you growing up, what were the circumstances?

By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, I was in Washington, D.C. Before that, Boston. Born in Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where my father is from.

Your character Mrs. Ling has a story that's particularly poignant for gay people who have struggled with their parents. Where did you come up with that story?

I have a long history of, I guess you would call it, a political solidarity with the LGBT community, for lots of reasons. Not the least of which, I went to Bryn Mawr College, where there was a very strong feminist, lesbian, transgender, questioning population on campus that helped me learn a lot about how much I needed to evolve as a human being. It was very natural for me to see that as part of the tapestry of stories that needed to be told [in Bridge & Tunnell, this one was really huge. I did a lot of research about what kinds of factors go into how people are allowed to stay in this country, and this is a huge problem.

Indeed.

The more I looked into it, the more I realized how close it was to my own life. I have a relative who's from the West Indies. She's out, and she was not going to be allowed to stay with her partner, so they had to leave St. Thomas and go live in Tortola to hang out and do what they needed to do.

And here in the U.S.--

In order to live your life as a couple, you have this whole other layer of restrictions placed on your already compromised status as an immigrant. Obviously we're behind square 1 in this country. We have a homophobic zealot in the White House who is literally trying to legislate whether people are going to have a love life or not. It's insane. But on top of that, you add, for an immigrant's purposes, this other kind of potent cocktail of what it means to come here from another country, what it means to have your traditions and then your kids growing up here, and then what does it mean if one of your kids comes out? I have so many friends and so many loved ones who have some connection to that story one way or another.

Thank you for making sure that the issue of gay couples is so strongly presented.

Oh, please! My husband's got two morns, and I've got a brother-in-law who's married to another man, and when I get together with our families and realize that there are people actively working to make sure they're not allowed to be together, that's all the reminder I need. These are the people who sustain me, this is my family, and it's threatened from all these other angles all the time.

Want to say anything else?

I feel really privileged to get to share this show with audiences of every background, and I hope that people from the LGBT community will come out and be part of the audience. It's so important for people to see love happening next to them.