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Sarah Jones has a hard time sitting still.  

Regardless of whether she’s holding court on the propaganda on Fox News, her recent successful lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission regarding her satirical hip-hop poem “Your Revolution” — “Technically, we haven’t won,” she explained Wednesday before her show, “but the FCC has admitted wrongdoing, and now ‘Revolution’ can be heard on the radio again … so call it poetic justice” — or the quality of the falafel she’s munching on, the 28-year-old poet and performance artist punctuates her statements with kinetic hand gestures and restless movements that are reminiscent less of a theatrical diva than a dervish.  

As anyone who has seen “Surface Transit” — her one-woman show that’s been selling out the Berkeley Rep for the last two weeks — can attest, even her silent and still moments on stage pack an emotional wallop. 

The theater will announce Friday that the run has been extended through June 1. Tickets for the extra shows go on sale this Sunday. 

Considering her background as a poet, it’s no surprise that she’s mastered the art of knowing exactly what to say and when to say it. But what is shocking is her chameleonic ability to turn herself into the eight disparate characters that comprise “Surface Transit’s” tour of the human condition with little more than a few minimal costume changes and an arsenal of accents at her disposal. Running the gamut from a recovering hip-hop MC to a Jewish grandmother to a white supremacist businessman from Alabama, Jones has a knack for both pitch-perfect mimicry and total transformation. 

“I was doing these poetry slams in New York, really pouring on the performance part of it,” she said, (it was her winning the prestigious Nuyorican Poets Café’s Grand Slam Championship in 1997 that catapulted her into the spotlight), “and I remember thinking, I’m doing the best I can to convey this idea I have to the audience. But what if I could actually take the experience I had of, say, meeting a homeless woman ... and instead of being this third party, what if she came up and delivered these ideas herself? What if they got to feel what was so compelling to me about this person? 

“Of course,” she added, “no one was there to tell me, ‘What, are you crazy? You’ve never done any acting before. Just read your poems, then sit down!’ It never occurred to me that it would be strange to become somebody else. Luckily, no one told me I was out of my mind. And luckily, it seems to have worked out.” 

She discovered a facility for impersonating different voices while attending the United Nations School in New York (during the interview, she broke into an East Indian accent that was uncannily accurate). Her tenure as a spoken word dynamo gave her the fearlessness to perform her heart out, she said. What she hadn’t expected was the time it would take to put such a show together. 

“When I’ve got the right elements — a room to bounce around in, access to the people I want to base my characters on, the space to observe … videotapes to get the right physicality, which is incredibly important — I can usually knock something like ‘Transit’ or ‘Waking The American Dream’ [her new show, which plays the Yerba Buena Arts Center in June] in a few months. At first, it was difficult. Now, it’s like a recipe. I know I’ve got to pre-heat the oven to 350, let it bake for 20 minutes, and then let the juices start running clear,” she laughed.  

“Mostly, though, what I need is something grounded in the truth. Almost all of the characters in “Transit” were around me, either major figures or minor players in my life, but they were based on real people that I’d been thinking about for a while. Even the most far-fetched of them, like the racist businessman … I had met this smooth-talker in an airport lounge in Atlanta years ago. And even though he wasn’t a Klansman or anything like that, I could see how someone with a gift of gab could persuade you of even the evilest of ideas. It’s happened throughout history. So even he is grounded in reality, unfortunately.” 

What may be the most impressive aspect of Jones’ work is that even her worst characters, like the businessman or the homophobic cop, are still granted a sense of humanity. “In the end, even the vilest of us is still a human being, and it’s the artist’s responsibility to show that,” she said. “I’m interested in challenging the status quo, which isn’t the most popular thing for artists to be doing right now. But I’m even more interested in seeing what binds people. We’re all here on this earth. We’ve all got to work things out together.”