The Many Masks of Dan Hoyle
Dan Hoyle is an actor of improbable parts. His first one-man show, a study of American industry abroad, required him to play sweatshop workers in Hanoi and protesters in Quito. When acting out Nigerian oil politics, he was both militants and rebels. Performing all the characters in a scene is hard, and Hoyle, who lives in Oakland, makes it harder by playing only people who really exist; his method is to interview strangers and channel them onstage, a practice he calls “journalistic theatre.” “I feel my job is to connect people to people again,” he said the other day, in advance of his latest one-man show, “Takes All Kinds,” which returns to Joe’s Pub on August 16th. “I work in front of a big mirror and, when I see somebody who doesn’t look like me, that’s a start.”
Hoyle grew up in a performing family. His father, Geoff Hoyle, is a famous clown. Alongside Bill Irwin, Geoff was a principal in the Pickle Family Circus, and he originated the role of Zazu in “The Lion King” on Broadway. At home, in San Francisco, the family spoke in an inversion dialect they called the Lang (“The Lion King” became “King of the Lies”), and they studied the world from park benches. “My dad would be, like, ‘Now, look at how that guy is walking—is it a choice or an injury?’ ” Hoyle said. “San Francisco was a more affordable, more diverse city, and there was an openness, like, ‘What’s your story?’ ” When he started college, at Northwestern, he took trains to Chicago to chat up anyone he met. At school, he learned that this was called “performance ethnography.”
In 2008, Hoyle went around the country talking with people in red districts. “The stuff that I was hearing is what became the Tea Party and then Trump,” he said. He put it in a show. For “Takes All Kinds,” Hoyle, now forty-six, went looking for people in purple America who weren’t natural activists but who stumbled into efforts at reconciliation and change. He transforms himself into a Phish-head in Florida lobbying the school board on behalf of his lesbian daughter, and a pair of MAGA-supporting Latino barbers. “I’m listening for stories that complicate a surface-level understanding,” he explained. “My friend always says, ‘If you want to get close to somebody, stand next to them.’ It’s a joke—but also true.”
On a recent Tuesday, Hoyle was in the South Bronx, looking for people to stand next to. He struck up a conversation at the Citi Bike rack at 167th Street. He texted a man known as Pop (Jahar Simmons); they had met when Hoyle lived nearby. Hoyle had never put Pop in a show. He walked in circles looking for him, then his phone buzzed. “I don’t see you,” he said, and squinted. “Oh, there you at.” Pop, a guy in his mid-thirties with a white T-shirt and a mane of braids coiled atop his head, perched in the entrance to the Webster Houses project with two men, one lanky and dressed in Helmut Lang trackwear, the other built like a wrestler and wearing shades. “Son, D., what’s going on?” Pop said. “You can’t be white and lost in the hood.”
Hoyle told Pop’s friends that he acts out real people’s stories.
“Ask him, did I get a story yet,” Pop said.
“Did Pop get a story yet?” the tall man asked.
“Not fucking yet!” Pop bellowed.
Pop visited Hoyle whenever he went to the Bay Area. The first time he and a friend went to see one of Hoyle’s shows, he felt out of place. (“We smelled like a pound of weed, like a pack,” he said.) Then Hoyle gave him a shout-out onstage, and the weather changed. “All the people coming up to me: ‘You from the Bronx? What’s it like?’ ” He affected a grave look: “ ‘Walking over dead bodies every day. People getting shot.’ ”
His friends laughed. Pop worked days at the high school and nights at the hospital, and he used weekends to organize block parties. The guy with shades, Carlee Hopkins, was a counsellor for juveniles in detention; the other man, Ro Smith, worked in resale. This spring, he bought the entire stock of Knicks hats at Foot Locker and Dick’s Sporting Goods, for forty-six dollars apiece, and, when the Knicks peaked and shops ran out, sold the hats for a hundred and fifty dollars each. Smith asked Hoyle whether his plays were on YouTube.
“Thing is, it really needs to be experienced live,” Hoyle said.
“Motherfucker’s doing voices,” Pop explained. “Changing his face—”
“Pop, you ready to do my show?” Hoyle asked. “We’ll give you an opener.”
“Give me something!” Pop said. “Put me in the game, Coach—put me in the game.” ♦