Celebrating Black History Month: Ciara Renée Honors Sarah Jones & the 'Super Power' of Mixed Race Artists

In honor of Black History Month, Broadway.com asked actors, directors and playwrights to tell us about black theater-makers who inspired them. Stars jumped at the chance to honor those who came before them, and in the process, taught us about the fundamental contributions of black artists to the American theater. To read the other entries in this series, click here.

Ciara Renée is currently playing Elsa in Frozen on Broadway. She made her Broadway debut in Big Fish in 2013, and soon after joined the cast of Pippin as a replacement for the Leading Player. Off-Broadway, she recently starred in The Wrong Man (2019) at MCC Theater. On television, she is known for her role as Hawkgirl in the CW’s DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. When asked which black theater artist inspired her, Renée said Sarah Jones, the Tony-winning actor and playwright known for her solo shows Bridge & Tunnel and Sell/Buy/Date. 

Sarah Jones was born in Baltimore, Maryland to an African-American father and mother of mixed Caribbean-American descent. She is known for creating groundbreaking solo shows that interrogate issues of sex, race and the failure of the American dream, and her chameleonic ability to inhabit people of wildly different ethnicities and genders. She made her Broadway debut in Bridge & Tunnel (2006), a solo show dramatizing the diverse immigrant makeup of New York City (Jones grew up in Queens), and received a special Tony Award. In 2016, her solo show about sex workers in the 21st century, Sell/Buy/Date, premiered off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club, and she has performed it multiple times in NYC and Los Angeles. Jones is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and has given a TED Talk three times.

Renée on Jones: “I would say the person of color who has most inspired me is Sarah Jones, creator of Sell/Buy/Date and other incredible works like the Tony Award-winning Bridge and Tunnel. I saw Sell/Buy/Date, her heartbreaking, biting, hilarious, all-around-masterpiece of a one-woman show a few years ago, and it shook me to my core. Not only is Sarah an adept performer who transitions in and out of many different characters with ease—a feat that has inspired my own work as an actress—but her writing (and her activism) on complicated subjects is stunning. Her intense intellect and her deep compassion and understanding of the many facets of the human condition make her work powerful. I often feel that’s a bit of a super power of mixed people. Spanning the distances between several identities can really open your eyes and allow you the ability to see all sides—a sort of forced practice in empathy that Sarah uses masterfully in her work, which she creates; a dream of mine. As a person of color, you don’t always see your story represented in what’s available, so you’re forced to make it. And I don’t know of anyone doing it quite as well as Ms. Jones."