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The only question unanswered at the end of “Surface Transit,” Sarah Jones’ one-woman show at Berkeley Repertory’s Thrust Stage, is “What’s that title all about?” Simple enough: It refers to the bus rides during which this New Yorker found sources for several of the characters she portrays so brilliantly.  

The performance is a skillful mix of different personas, seven in all. They vary wildly from an elderly black street woman to a white male supremacist; from a white European widow raising a child of mixed race to a streetwise young woman fending off a klutzy attempt to pick her up. There’s even an orthodox Jewish grandmother rocking sweetly away. 

Different as the characters are in sex, age and position in life, Jones is convincing as she morphs from one to another before your eyes. It’s no surprise that she has won as many awards as she has. 

Curiously, Jones does not want to be called an actress: She’s a “performer.” It’s a stance which has led the poor souls who write about her to such awkward circumlocutions as “playwright-poet-performer-activist.” Her position may be based on the fact that she has never studied acting or playwriting. (So? Neither did Shakespeare and his cronies.) Her talent for accents is based on years of mimicry. As a bi-racial and multi-ethnic child, she morphed into “whatever made sense” in her families’ different cultures. Later on, she honed her skills when she attended the United Nations International School in New York.  

But there is far more to Jones’ performance than accurate accents: her portrayals of a breadth of characters are mesmerizingly convincing. Young, old, they become real. Feminine as she is, her characterization of three male characters is unquestioningly male. It isn’t a woman behaving like a man; it’s three male characters. That’s all. Even though you’ve watched her make a few quick costume changes right before your eyes, she’s a male.  

She’s amazingly talented. 

Jones has written a script which is basically a feminist, liberal, anti-racist polemic; her messages are clear, but shown in situations with so much humor and understanding — even of the other side of the debates — that the evening is one of entertainment, not edification. 

Her presentation, for example, of a transit guard trying desperately to explain away his attempts to force sex on an unwilling partner could almost arouse sympathy for his ignorance of and obliviousness to his own behavior. It isn’t a situation that seems the stuff of comedy, but even here there is wit and a kind of bemused comprehension. But make no mistake: “Surface Transit” is feminist to the core. 

Perhaps one of the most delightful parts of the program is the portrayal of a teenage black girl at a bus stop contemptuously fending off the advances of an overly interested stranger. 

This scene includes a feminist hip-hop song, drafted as Jones’ rebuke to the relentless misogyny of the hip-hop scene. When it was banned from radio on the basis of indecency, she became the first performing artist to successfully sue the Federal Communications Commission. 

Wildly different as the production’s individual characters are, they’re linked by some incident in which they cross paths with the next one in line. It provides a continuity to the evening which is structurally satisfying as well as a means of conveying the play’s underlying messages.  

The best way to sum up “Surface Transit” is the fact that on the night this writer attended the performance, the audience, both male and female, gave it a standing ovation: a cheering, standing ovation.