Interview: Dan Hoyle of TALK TO YOUR PEOPLE at The Marsh Explores the Messiness of Our Shared Humanity

Award-winning actor and playwright Dan Hoyle is making a much-anticipated return to live performance at The Marsh San Francisco with the premiere of his latest solo work, Talk To Your People. Well-known for past Marsh hits such as Border People and The Real Americans which explored communities very different from his own, Hoyle is for the first time focusing his lens on his own tribe of mostly white liberal men in order to delve into issues of race, privilege, masculinity and power. Based on research from his signature method of what he calls "the journalism of hanging out," Talk to Your People is a comic, nuanced and thought-provoking inquiry into some of the biggest issues we are all dealing with right now.

I caught up with Hoyle by phone a couple of weeks ago to find out what prompted him to create this show, how he views issues of representation and inclusion, and to discuss his own family legacy in fostering human connection through observational humor. In conversation, Hoyle is thoughtful and reflective, with a self-deprecating sense of humor and a tendency to talk in long, discursive sentences as he grapples with the complexity of our shared human experience. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

With Talk to Your People, it sounds like you're taking a really interesting approach to exploring complex questions of race, privilege and masculinity. What led you to create it?

Well, I got off the stage the last time in New York, cause the run of Border People got cut short there [due to COVID], and flew home thinking like a lot of people that it was only gonna be six weeks or whatever. That stretched into months, and then we had George Floyd's murder and the multi-layered reckonings around that, and in theaters there was a big sort of lightning bolt with the We See You, White American Theater document. I have a friend who was one of the original signatories so I called her up in New York. She'd been attending all these quite anguished meetings in which there were prominent white-guy artistic directors sort of trying to figure out how to do the right thing. And then we were talking about my work and she said "Well, why don't you do a show about liberal white folks?" I said I already did a show about conservative white folks, The Real Americans, where I travelled through white small-town rural America, and she said, "No, not like the people in red hats at the rallies. Like your people."

And at first I was like "Well, I don't know...." What I've done for the last 20 years has always been about connecting across divides and amplifying stories that aren't really of my people. And then I thought, "Well, it is kind of interesting actually, turning the anthropological lens, what I call the journalism of hanging out, on this sort of demographic." And it also worked out because I was gonna be stuck in the Bay Area, and there's a ton of liberal white dudes here. [laughs]

I started out on Instagram sort of messing with things kind of satirically, and she was like "Yeah, that's fine, but when you do satire, it allows people to say 'oh that's not me - that's them.'" And so the show is now much more slice-of-life stories of people that I think the audience will recognize part of themselves in. What you come away with, I think, is a real sense hopefully of the complexity and humanity of folks, which can sometimes get lost when we are only talking theoretically and in categories.

Your shows tackle so many complex issues, but they're also very moving and entertaining. How do you go about taking your research and theatricalizing the material so that you're not just doing straight-up reportage?

Thank you, Jim. I take a big pride in trying do that. Theater is like a social tool that needs to be wrapped in a delightful, tasty confection for it to work. I don't ever try to tell people what to think. It's much more showing the messiness, getting into the grooves and the crevices of people's stories, as opposed to the bullet points. And I think the comedy and entertainment comes out of seeing people be vulnerable and truthful and wrestle with stuff. It's like, people have this "Oh, shit!" moment, you know? The writing and the character creation process go hand in hand. It's based on people I met, some more composites than others, and then using that to try to create something that is like you say really entertaining. I'm proud of the fact that I get people who don't see a ton of theater, and people who do see a ton of theater. I think that's fun to have that world reflected in the audience, too.

Like many of your shows, Talk to Your People was developed with and directed by Charlie Varon. What is your process for working with Charlie?

I kind of woodshed some things, sometimes it's pretty preliminary, but it works best if I have this character and part of the story, and then work on it till I feel like "OK, I have something." I work in front of a mirror, and when I start talking to that person in the mirror and feel like "Oh, I'm not me anymore, I'm somebody else." then I know that that's what hopefully the audience is gonna see and experience. And then I'll show it to Charlie and he'll sort of respond, and a lot of what he's saying is "OK, this is really interesting. Can you tell me more, go deeper here?" and just try to push into the complexity and the messiness.

One of the things you're really good at is portraying the way specific body language delineates character. When I watch you I often think, "Oh, I know that person!"

I mean, it's kinda cheesy but I think success is talent times hours, and I'm pretty darned disciplined. I love the craft of creating a character that feels 100% real and also surprising. That's what I'm trying to give the audience. There's all this research about how we connect and how our imaginations get turned on and how we are able to humanize each other, mostly through actual experience. That's really the way that barriers and divides come down. I'm extremely grateful and privileged that I have this job where I get to go out and have these experiences and think about these things, and then create something out of that. And the audience walks in for 70 minutes and hopefully they have that similar type of experience within a theater.

You've often portrayed characters of different races, ethnicities and genders, which can be a tricky thing to pull off. Do you ever have any trepidations about doing that?

Yes. It's something I've thought about my entire career and of course there's a shameful history of bad representation cross-culturally, cross-racially, in so many ways and I'm really hype-aware of that. Those really shameful representations live in stereotypes and demeaning and simplifying people and stories, and I strive to do the opposite. I've really tried to ground what I do in respect and curiosity and empathy and specificity so that it uplifts and allows audiences to connect, and deepens our shared humanity. That sounds trite, but I really do believe I'm not just doing it cause I'm pretty good at it. I don't do it nonchalantly at all.

And with a solo show, there's always this tension or even a contradiction really, between inclusivity and representation. If you just tell stories of one race or one type of person, is that pushing us forward more? There is a tradeoff there, so I think that opens up some interesting questions.

Talk to Your People is the first time you're focusing the lens basically on your own demographic as a white, liberal American guy. What has that been like?

Well, it's so interesting because there's a way in which I have to find a piece of myself in all the characters I play, in order for it to work. Border People was really interesting for me because it was all these people who cross multiple borders, literally and metaphorically, and I've often felt that I'm a cultural border crosser, you know? That's kind of the work that I do, so I felt a deep connection with a lot of those characters.

This show is funny because it's like "Okay, so what part of me is the bro? And what part of me is the person who's not completely comfortable [talking about race]?" I mean the characters I play are based on other people, but the guy who's worried about the sort of groupthink he sees in left-wing circles, or so scared to ask certain questions that they don't get asked, but at the same time being more horrified perhaps by the sort of toxic masculinity and white supremacy that is increasingly all around us - how do you locate yourself in that?

And one of the other things is finding that line between comedy and like humanizing them, right? I think there is something interesting about doing that at this time, humanizing these white guys who maybe some people feel [uncomfortable with]. That's an interesting challenge.

And if you just make fun of people, that's not really helpful.

Right, and I'm always much more interested in having the comedy be the tension in the interaction between this person and me, the audience being the "me," right? Like the audience gets to experience some version of what I was experiencing. And then also what people sometimes call the negative space of the "me" character, right? I don't ever actually play myself, but you see the journey that I'm on reflected through the other characters and how I respond to the characters and how they're responding to me.

Your father, Geoff Hoyle, is obviously an extremely accomplished stage performer, too. Do the two of you ever provide input on each other's work?

Yeah. He'll always give me some notes when he comes and sees the show. I think the biggest thing he gave me is a belief that all art is based in close observation of human behavior. We used to sit in Golden Gate Park when my brother and I were kids and my dad would say, "Hey, look at that guy over there, how he's walking. Does he have a limp, or is that something else, is that a style choice?" Or he'd say, "What do you think that guy's job is?" or "Look at the way he's feeding those pigeons."

My dad is a really bravura performer, and I sort of have the curiosity and the ability make friends and draw out people. People who know me know that I do this all the time. Like we just went up to the snow for the weekend and there was a couple of Afghan families from Herat Province making ice cream in the snow and I ended up talking to them. To me, it's just really interesting to constantly be connecting to people and hearing their stories; it's like one of the joys of being a human being. And anyway, long story short, I'm just saying I took some of that close observation stuff and then blasted it out into this world, taking a really global look, but it's all grounded in that close observation.

Just so you know, I don't think most dads do that kind of thing with their kids!

Yeah, for sure. I'm a dad now with two kids and definitely trying to pass that along. The other day I took my 6-year-old son to get bagels and then we sat out in a sidewalk café and I was kind of doing the same thing, telling him like "So how old do you think these kids are? Look at that girl. What do you think she's wanting from her dad?" And so on and so forth. I didn't know if it had any effect, but the next day my son said, "Oh, yeah! And then we had bagels and it was like we were watching a documentary." And I was like "Cool! OK!"

Isn't it amazing when you realize your kids actually do pay attention to you sometimes? [laughs]

I know! [laughs] And other times you're like, "Omigod, they're not. I'm failing!"

Your work tackles some pretty difficult subjects, but it always seems to come ultimately from a place of hope. So where are you finding hope in the world right now?

That's a good question. There's been times in the pandemic when I'm like "Do I want to keep doing this?" Do I really want to be up late at night, cause you know it takes me a long time to wind down, and I have to wake up early in the morning, I've got kids. Do I want to deal with the vulnerability of being an artist? Do I want to deal with any of this?

And then I got to do some workshop performances of this show. The first one was kind of rough, but then halfway through the second show there was this moment where I could feel the audience, and we were riding the wave together and they were connecting, they were experiencing joy. You could tell that they were excited by having this visceral experience and that it was created by our collective imaginations, and it was like "Oh, yeah, there's a reason to do this!"

In terms of the larger question of hope, there has been some tearing of the social fabric, no doubt. People have been cocooned and they've been cut off, people have lost friends, we can't agree on some pretty basic things right now. But I still go back to the power of connecting with people and having that experience of somebody who's a complete stranger and all of the sudden getting to hear some of their truth, you know? And closing that gap.

I'm not naïve, I'm not like "Can't we just all get along?" No, I'm sort of wildly based in reality. And the reality is there's difficult things that are not easy and they don't go away. But when you actually get to know somebody, you realize the complexity of lived experience. I think most of us go through life not being understood - I don't feel like I'm understood as a person a lot of the time - and I think part of what theater tries to do, and especially the work that I try to do, both in the research and the performance, is to understand somebody, and then to reflect that back so that audiences can understand somebody.

The goal is that we move through life being more curious and interested, and able to connect with more people. Cause to me, that's the only way forward. And theater is this sort of audacious thing right now. I think having collective joy and collective effervescence, that's a radical act, you know?

(All photos by Peter Prato)

Talk to Your People runs through April 16th (no performances March 24th, 25th & 26th) at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA. For information or to order tickets visit themarsh.org. All patrons must be fully vaccinated and show proof of vaccination along with valid ID during check-in before the performance and wear a face covering over while inside the theater.