Border People
Dan Hoyle
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| Dan Hoyle |
How many average-sized, white guys can start a one-man show in
San Francisco taking on the South Bronx, slang-filled dialect and the
smooth-moving body motions of a six-foot-five black man and not get booed off
the stage? What if that same white actor
employs numerous other ways of positioning his eyebrows, eyes, mouth, posture,
voice, and even black tee shirt in order to depict Mexican, Iraqi, Saudi
Arabian or Afghani individuals? What
actor of the majority race can get away with portraying unapologetically on the
stage other minority races and cultures, especially in a week when top governmental
officials from Virginia are being pressured to resign for past instances of
black-facing? The one actor I know that
no one would ever question his sincerity of purpose or his integrity of such
presentation is Dan Hoyle, celebrated and honored creator and performer of past
shows such as Tings Dey Happen about
Nigerian oil scandals and The Real
Americans, featuring everyday folks from Red States telling their side of
what is important in life.
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| Dan Hoyle |
Under the astute, sensitive direction of his co-developer,
Charlie Varon, Dan Hoyle presents at The Marsh, San Francisco, the premiere of Border People, “dedicated to those who
cross borders geographically or culturally, by choice or by necessity.” Based on interviews he had in such diverse
communities as the South Bronx projects, Canadian refugee safe houses near the
U.S. border, and border towns along Southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico, Dan
presents eleven individuals who tell us their frank, emotionally packed stories
– all authentically unveiled in their own words, voices, and cultural/personal idiosyncrasies. As each emerges from a brief blackout
interval from the last story, we are struck that before us is a totally
different looking person than the last we saw -- maybe this time with one
eyebrow always higher than the other or with a mouth frozen horizontally barely
moving while speaking or with hands that speak as loudly in their gentle waves
and spread-finger placement on the chest as do their words being heard. And from all these mouths come accents
ranging from the high, sweet, delicately accented voice of an Iraqi woman to
the rapid, hushed Spanish of a twenty-year old (his words translated for us in
projection).
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| Dan Hoyle |
The borders that each of these eleven have crossed vary in
nature and location, but their stories all ring with an anxiety and often a
trauma of living in a world where boundaries come with hard and fast rules,
both explicit and unwritten. Telling his
story of many woes but always with a friendly, big-toothed smile, Habib from
Saudi Arabia relates how he escaped with his wife and four kids a Saudi Arabia
where his life was at risk because he was not Muslim enough and how he then came
to California where he was confronted and ridiculed for being too Muslim. An older black man named Larry tells how a 4th
of July picnic with his family – a picnic on a park’s green grass that “If we
were a bunch of white people we would look like a Chevy commercial” -- is
deemed inappropriate for folks from the projects by a passing cop, landing Larry
in jail for protesting his right to have crossed some invisible but forbidden
(in the cop’s eyes) boundary. A young
gay man tears up as he explains how he snuck into the U.S., met his boyfriend
(one a manager of McDonalds, the other of a near-by Popeye’s), lost his
boyfriend, contracted himself HIV via drug use, was deported, and now has no
where to go because his Mexican family will not accept him. For him, many non-passable borders leave him
few choices, with his considering stopping medication and just letting eventual
AIDS solve everything.
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| Dan Hoyle |
As each narrative spills forth, the telling is void of
commentary or judgment by the creator/actor himself. The policies of the current U.S.
administration, for example, are not discussed; but their devastating effects
are a consistent thread through many of the mini-memoirs we hear. We are left
to draw our own conclusions from stories like that of an Afghani man who
escaped a life that began living under the rule of the Taliban who gathered him
and his boyhood friends up on Fridays and took them to a former soccer stadium
to watch (and cheer on) executions. With
narrowed eyes he explains how he eventually found his way to a Canada, where he
now seeks asylum. He would prefer the
U.S. but has decided “Canada is the U.S. of the 21st century ...
U.S. 2.0.”
Likewise, we are left to contemplate how could it be a
Mexican-born man with the chosen name of Mike Evans – “the whitest I could
think of” – was adopted at five by South Carolinians, fought for his country in
the Middle East, but was recently deported because he always thought “permanent
residency card” meant forever. Yet we
hear how when dead someday, he would have the right for his body to cross back
into the U.S. to be buried here in full military fashion.
The overall resiliency of most of these individuals and even
an optimism that still exists where one might think there could be none very much
resounds in the honoring portrayals Dan Hoyle presents in his Border People. We laugh; we sit stunned and unbelieving; we
shed our own tear. We also are left in
sheer amazement of the hope that can still exist for an Iraqi woman -- now in
Lancaster, Pennsylvania -- who faces daily discrimination for wearing her hajib
but who says with a tearful smile, “When I make a new friend, I think, maybe
this can be my country, too.”
Rating: 5 E
Border People
continues in an extended run through April 27, 2019, with shows on Wednesdays,
Thursdays, and Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 5 p.m. at The Marsh, San
Francisco, 1062 Valencia Street. Tickets
are available online at https://themarsh.org/.
Photos Credit: Peter Prato
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