There comes a point in everyone’s life when they simply refuse to see the other side of an argument. Perhaps it’s the result of trauma, continuous misinformation, or the other side being factually wrong and you refusing to indulge them. Whatever the reason, it’s easy to forget that every person has story in which they are the main character. Mind you, that’s no excuse for some people—like, say, a twice-impeached, chronically bankrupt fascist accused of multiple rapes—to equate civil rights activists to his white supremacist supporters, but one hopes there may be a way to reach said supporters (or their kids) to prevent any further destruction.
Dan Hoyle seems optimistic about this. In his latest investigative solo piece, Takes All Kinds (world premiere through October 26 at The Marsh, SF), the Oakland-based performer recreates two years of interviews from red-staters of all stripes in the hopes of discovering exactly what it would take to help bring our divided nation away from the fascism-normalizing trend it’s been on of late. One can imagine he’s doing this for the preservation of his own sanity, as the show’s prelude finds him at a liberal frou-frou cocktail party where he has to explain his “theatre journalist” profession to people who wonder why he dabbles in not one, but two “collapsing” industries.
What’s more, when his wife calls to ask if he picked up snacks for their two kids, he suddenly finds himself having an existential crisis of not being able to perform a simple task when democracy is being eaten away at like a termite-infested tree. Why he chose to decompress by visiting parts of the country that love to burn books, I’ll never know. But visit them he did.
Among his stops is a Latine barbershop in Nevada where the majority of employees are unabashedly pro-Trump. One has no issue with the way Trump bashes immigrants (Latine or otherwise), because “I ain’t an immigrant!” They used to be Obama supporters until he they realized that he wanted to negotiate rather than bomb anyone (all evidence to the contrary), because these machismos feel that “Scrappin’ is a rite of passage” on a small or global scale. When an anti-Trump elder tries to point out everything the others have gotten wrong about their spray-tanned hero, they all berate him for relying on “facts.”
Hoyle meets a Black woman in Nevada who recalls both being stalked by two white men who wanted to rob her of her nice car, and of her living in Florida near the very gated community where Trayvon Martin was murdered. (She also provides an insightful history into that community.) This testimony almost seems to tie in directly with Hoyle’s later interview with Polly Sheppard, lone survivor of the church massacre by white supremacist Dylann Storm Roof. Both have seen the hatred in eyes of angry white men and barely lived to tell the tale.
In the Carolinas, he visits a bar where he’s pegged as “hippie,” but is served by the take-no-shit bartender with no qualms about 86-ing an open-carry advocate who tries to enter armed to the teeth. We learn the bartender used to be a Blackwater merc who has PTSD from all the violence he both witnessed and committed in the Middle East. He seems conflicted about US military policy and haunted by its hypocrisy: “Every empire’s done sacrifices. At least the Aztecs did it in public.”
Perhaps the most important interview (of what we’re shown) is of a Latino man in Missouri who was abused by his mother and spent much of his life in prison, where he was radicalized into violence-first solutions to all problems. A meeting with a prison therapist changes his life in a way that seems to surprise him all these years later.
Through all of the dour tales, it’s the humor of the stories that constantly catches you off-guard. The Trump-lovin’ Latino barbers don’t seem to care all that much about Hoyle’s left-leaning politics (if they know about them at all) so much as the fact that he’s in desperate need of a haircut. Hell, they’re excited to show him how many guns they bought during the 2020 COVID lockdowns.
The play’s overall theme seems to be that anyone can change: a low-income neighborhood can turn into the affluent burg where Trayvon was murdered; Obama-loving people of color can vote for a racist who wants those people deported; a mercenary can turn into an anti-open-carry bartender. It’s no surprise that the latter story and the aforementioned prisoner tale represent the play’s later scenes. The entire play is about change, but Hoyle’s ultimate thesis – his arc, if you will – is that we can all ultimately change for the better. Point in fact, the chameleonic performer is clearly insisting that the first step to doing so is to be open to the stories of others. You can debate amongst yourselves as to whether such an idea is childish optimism bordering on ignorance.
I caught Takes All Kinds during a sold out opening-weekend matinee. As usual, The Marsh had two or three air purifying towers scattered about, but there was also the addition of a large fan. All of them were barely a match for record-breaking heat in a poorly-ventilated old building in The Mission. Aside from myself, there were maybe a dozen others masked for this hourlong show. My Aranet4 was reading CO² levels of 2,449ppm by the time Hoyle took a bow.
Under the assured direction of the Bay Area’s own Aldo Billingslea, I dare say my first Dan Hoyle show was indeed a good intro into what the buzz has been all about these many years. The performer and director take great pains to make the interview subjects colorful, but not stereotypical. All of them (save for the Bay Area cocktail party bougies) come from states that—should the deeply-flawed electoral college be believed—seem to favor the very empirical overreach that they themselves claim to be against.
One isn’t oblivious enough to believe that compiling their stories into a solo show by an Oakland lefty will change these folks’ minds, but the show itself is a welcome reminder of how the faceless masses are actually a collection of folks who each want their story told. Forgetting that is partly why we have so many divisions in the first place.
DAN HOYLE’S TAKES ALL KINDS’s world premiere runs through October 26 at The Marsh-SF. Tickets and further info here.
