An invitation to small town America from actor Dan Hoyle

With summer just a few months away, many in the Bay Area are already planning their warm-weather adventures. But for those of you who want to take a trip across America without leaving the comfort of the Bay, you can join one Bay Area resident on a "roadtrip" that showcases how all of us Americans are different ... and yet similar. It’s a solo performance called “The Real Americans,” and it’s by Dan Hoyle. KALW’s Laura Klivans has the story.

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LAURA KLIVANS: It’s a typical Friday night in San Francisco’s Mission District, the bars and restaurants are teeming with young people who are out in hoards and ready to make noise. But inside a teal building on Valencia and 22^nd  Street, the crowd ranges from teenagers to seniors who are instead ready to listen. Around 100 people eagerly await solo actor Dan Hoyle to come on stage.

KAYLA SUSSELL: Dan Hoyle is a genius, and I’m really looking forward to seeing him applying his vision to Americans. It should be every bit as interesting as his take on Nigeria.

That’s Kayla Sussell. She became a fan of Hoyle after seeing his last solo show Tings Dey Happen about oil politics in Nigeria. 

HOUSE MANAGER: How’s everybody doing tonight?

As the lights dim and people scramble to turn off their cell phones, a wiry Dan Hoyle walks onto the stage in jeans and a gray t-shirt. The lights come up on a sparse stage. Hoyle is helped only by a black chair, a hand towel, and a few hats. The rest of his scenes —tables full of food, football fields, truck stops—all come from Hoyle’s imaginative shaping of the space.

DAN HOYLE (as RON): Come on now Tommy, hit em low buddy, hit em low and he falls down. So you just touring around? Man, you ever been to New York? That place is freakin’ crazy. They got those meat sandwiches you know right on the sidewalk? Cuttin’ up the meat right there on the sidewalk. Prostitutes all over. Every day chasing girls, eating the meat sandwiches. The only problem? Traffic.

Hoyle created this show from the interviews he conducted on a 100-day journey through what he calls “small town” America. Traveling with a van, guitar and some notebooks, he visited 27 states and chatted up as many people as possible.

HOYLE: What I think I’m trying to put out there is this picture of a country that I was surprised by as being quite polarized and the difficulty of just the notion that if we just talk to each other everything will be fine—it’s just a problem of communication. What I found was in fact there are really significant differences and that those are growing.

And through his show, Hoyle seeks to represent these different opinions. He takes us from characters he met on the road…

HOYLE (as RON): I was in Iraq. First gulf war. ’91. The people over there? Totally freakin’ different.

…to those he comes home to in the Bay Area:

HOYLE (as PETE): Hey you want some of this fruit compote? The pears are house-braised and the syrup was sustainably raised on reclaimed industrial land by an alternative girls school for children of the Taliban.

Hoyle has performed sold out shows since The Real Americans debuted back in January, and it has been extended at the Marsh Theater again and again. Hoyle sees a need for these stories in San Francisco because:

HOYLE: I think what people forget living in the city is that America is a conservative country—the most conservative industrial country I think in the world. And there’s a lot of social and historical and cultural reasons why, as I joke about.

And they forget that fact, Hoyle says, because Americans in general tend to narrowcast. We read news from the sources we agree with, live in the places we choose, and…

HOYLE: People don’t have to interact with people that think differently. And it’s actually exhausting, apparently, to do so.

But through his show, Hoyle demonstrates that people cannot avoid diverse opinions and conflict within themselves. Hoyle highlights this through many of his characters: one San Francisco yuppie supports American troops abroad, a man from a homophobic household reveals his homosexuality to Hoyle, and a paraplegic man named Mikey plays up his role of “angry conservative.” His wife explains:

HOYLE (as JESSICA): Dan, Mikey hoots and hollers but honestly, it’s mostly just redneck pride. I mean he has to say it. I mean, it’s like you said your family is very artistic, so if somebody asks if you like foreign films you have to say yes, even if you think they’re junk.

Hoyle hopes that people will appreciate the layers to his show.

HOYLE: And I hope that people are laughing and also leaving the theater and thinking and a couple days later a line pops into their head and it kinda sits with them. I think that’s my real goal. I think that’s the test of art that has an impact—that stays with you after you leave the theater. There’s some dancing, there’s some singing, some guitar playing. My job as an artist I think is to create whatever is the most exciting, thought-provoking way of telling a story, and you know, as many ways as I can do that in the solo-performance medium is good. I’m going to give you some characters, and then I’m going to give you myself processing it, and then I’m going to give you a dance, and then I’m going to give you a song. 

And in this solo medium Hoyle excels. Through his multitude of characters we are invited to gather around the dinner table somewhere in small town America and question what this country really is, who comprises it, and where we fall in that.

HOYLE (as JIM): So good to see all of you around this table again. Let’s pray. Lord, we know the end times will soon be here. ‘Til that moment, we ask that you continue to guide our country. Amen.

For Crosscurrents, I’m Laura Klivans.

Dan Hoyle's "The Real Americans" is currently on hiatus, but you can check the Marsh Theater website for show updates.

This story originally aired on July 15, 2010.