When Oakland-based actor/playwright Dan Hoyle opens a new show, it’s expected that local media will cover it. Hoyle has been performing in the Bay Area for long enough to qualify as a mainstay, if not quite a one-man institution.
What you might not expect is for Hoyle to pop up in the likes of the Idaho Mountain Express, a community paper that primarily serves Ketchum, Idaho, and nearby Bellevue (populations 3,500 and 2,500 or so, respectively), as he did for Takes All Kinds, his newest one man show that just extended its run at The Marsh Theater on Valencia Street until June 6.
Like his previous shows, 2010’s The Real Americans and 2014’s Each and Every Thing, Hoyle developed Takes All Kinds traveling from state to state interviewing and closely observing “real Americans” and adapting those conversations into monologues told in their voices and mannerisms.
For Takes All Kinds, Hoyle sought out lefty crusaders in unlikely places, including a blue collar 20-something preaching Christian and socialist dogma to his coworkers, or a curmudgeonly vet bartender who brands Hoyle “a hippie” but swiftly unfolds his anti-war sentiments rooted in his Iraq war trauma and regret.
“Real Americans was me confronting the other half of the country that [eventually] became the Trump coalition,” Hoyle says when we spoke by phone. “This show is about the people who are in these battleground places who are pushing the country forward in places that are really complicated and tough.”
“Everyone thinks, ‘Gosh, how do you get people to open up?’” Hoyle said. “Most people feel misunderstood, and when you give somebody a chance to be heard, that’s something most of us don’t go through life getting. People are excited to be listened to.”
For Takes All Kinds, Hoyle attended a convention for armed preppers, the kind of people who buy dried food and ammunition in bulk in preparation for a second American civil war. “It was started by this husband and wife: She taught classes in self-defense and firing AR-15s but also making salves and balms. It was a weird confluence of hippie and military paranoia,” he said.
Somehow, none of that ended up in the final show: Hoyle had too much else to work with.
This style of “journalistic theater” can be traced back to the work of Anna Deavere Smith, who used similar techniques to bring the 1992 Los Angeles uprising to stage with Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. His take on the genre has won Hoyle acclaim at home and in critical circles, but if he just stopped there he’d probably face accusations of being a tourist with a gimmick or, even worse, of exploiting “red state America” for the entertainment of West and East Coast theatergoers.
Hoyle isn’t out to merely mimic his subjects, he seeks to connect with them. He has taken Takes All Kinds and its predecessors to rural and smalltown venues, including, when possible, the very same places where he conducted his interviews. “To be able to bring that story back, that’s just the highest form,” he explained.
Hoyle never changes costumes and has no sets; characters and locations are communicated purely through his vocal and physical performance. Hoyle embodies characters like a group of barbershop employees in Las Vegas who talk up how much they love Donald Trump, or a Phish-loving, hallucinogen-popping dad at a Florida school board meeting, who reflects on his right-wing upbringing and wonders, “Why am I the only weird one in my family?”
Hoyle does not mock or disdain these characters, but he also doesn’t let them off the hook. Those Trump-loving barbers reveal their identification with the president’s uninhibited pathology with their own aspirations for material success.
Less nuanced is Hoyle’s embodiment of Bay Area liberals. Although this section leads to a handful of good jokes (one woman frets that other parents’ may be bringing “MAGA-leaning snack choices” to soccer games), these characters feel one-dimensional and tacked-on.
But that’s a small part of the show. In the hands of a less carefully calibrated performer, this kind of theater might end up looking like a charades player with a head injury, but Hoyle is mesmerizing to watch and listen to.
Hoyle credits his director, Santa Clara University professor Aldo Billingslea. “We met in San Quentin when we were both there to see some performances by inmates,” Billingslea says. “He likes to tell people we met in prison, but neither of us has ever been arrested.”
I was skeptical going into Takes All Kinds: The state of the nation today leaves me with little patience for empathy exercises or showy displays of “reaching out” for unlikely common ground. But Hoyle is just so good that he breaks straight through that cynical defensive posture.
Takes All Kinds is clear-eyed, compassionate, and non-preachy. Hoyle’s diligence and dedication open an unusually wide window into the world outside of our own lives. We should all spend some time looking through it.
