Takes All Kinds
Dan Hoyle
The Marsh
In the fall of 2022, Dan Hoyle found himself at a “40s-something” party where during the chit-chat of chardonnay sipping, someone said to him, “So you do journalistic theatre? But aren’t they both kinda collapsing?”
Given an insatiable drive to discover core truths about a community, culture, and/or even an entire country; a personality that exudes immediately likeability and garners trust; and a powerful capability to listen and then portray without judgment opinions across full ranges of differences, Dan Hoyle has proven time and again the opposite reality. There is no sign of collapse in his self-styled journalism and his uncanny ability to become on stage the people he has met and interviewed.
Just as he has done in a long list of highly acclaimed, one person shows that he has written and performed and that have graced multiple stages across the country and the globe (Border People, Each and Every Thing, The Real Americans, Tings Dey Happen), Dan Hoyle has once again created a must-see winner. His latest tour de force in both writing and performing is Takes All Kinds, now reopening after its 2024 premiere at his home away from home, The Marsh. Takes All Kinds exposes an array of people from eight states who both represent the current divides of politics and beliefs in this country and who, in many cases, show signs that there is still reason to hope, to believe some reconciliation of those differences may be possible.
For anyone who has ever seen Dan Hoyle on stage, one can never forget how the characters he portrays leave lasting memories as each comes to full life before us, often by the near dozens in just seventy-five minutes. Not only through instantaneous changes in his voice, accent, stance, and even hair but also through incredible shifts in his cheeks, his mouth/lip structure, the length of his total countenance, and the shapes of arms and hands does he metamorphize into every possible age; all gender possibilities; both sexes; and any given race, ethnicity, and nationality. And when portraying on stage – especially as a white, CIS male – people of other races or genders other than one’s own is appropriately frowned upon, Dan Hoyle does so in ways that only celebrate and honor those differences and never in any way to ridicule.
As the talented director of Takes All Kinds – Aldo Billingslea, Black Professor of Theatre Arts at Santa Clara University and well-loved actor and director on many Bay Area stages – writes in his Director Notes,
“… [E]ven though it’s a healthy impulse to ask whether a white guy like Dan should portray these characters of many cultures, genders, and colors, my ask is that you hold on to that question, reserve judgment. What we ask is that you have the courage to see the range of human complexity and vulnerability to listen with an open heart.”
We understand what Billingslea means as we welcome on stage in stunned silence to hear the story of an older Black woman as she sits nobly in a chair just a few feet from us recounting in her Southern voice how she looked directly in the eyes of a crazed, white man as he pointed his gun at her – all in the midst of a horrific mass shooting in a Black church. We cringe as we hear a high school senior from Sarasota, Florida tell how they were made to use the bathroom of their birth rather than the one of their current gender – a teen who along with a man whose daughter has come out as gay are two of 300 people waiting to attend a school board meeting and have their two minutes to speak to a board that has three Proud Boys backed candidates elected to its forum.
There’s a Black woman from Vegas who is chased in her red Camero by two guys who shout over to her, “Look at this Black bitch; how did she get a coupe like that?” She later sold the car in order not to be harassed again, concluding, “Rage is dangerous, and it’s become OK.”
A gnarly, gruff-sounding bartender who spent time as a Blackwater mercenary in Iraq matter-of-factly admits the women and children he killed adding, “Try sleeping after that.” He also hauntingly says, “Eight of ten in my unit are dead.”
A return to the 2022 cocktail party in San Francisco has a still-wine-sipping attendee ask Dan, “Wow, didn’t you say this show was hopeful; you haven’t started the hopeful part yet.”
But Dan did find plenty examples of hope from whom we hear their stories. One of the most powerful is our meeting Miss Margaret from Charleston, South Carolina. She is a white woman of gentil, blueblood upbringing who is on a mission to expose and tell truths through research in her own heritage and in those of people like her in the community. A DNA test that has the surprise outcome she is .1% African American leads her into a trail of discovery to find out that slaveholding and the selling of slaves is very much in her family’s history. She now tours telling her story while at the same time, researching the histories of others and exposing their long-held secrets. “If we don’t talk about the past, we can’t move forward.”
And the same could be said about talking about the present – not just the past – as we witness Dan Hoyle’s array of white, Black, and Latino chance acquaintances tell their stories and what they are doing to make a difference in their worlds. Maybe it is just saying their truths to the doubting co-workers around them even if they call him a “kook” (but “I’m a kook they trust”). Maybe it is standing on the streets of a Black neighborhood trying to convince people to register to vote – people who for good reasons do not believe the system will ever do anything to help their lives. Or maybe it is a convicted felon who spent two years of his prison time in solitary confinement and who is now trying to help rehabilitate others like himself by “showing empathy when they least deserve it.”
Each of these and a number of other stories come to full life through the medium of Dan Hoyle’s transformations – each the result of his own true empathy. For any of us who are finding ourselves losing hope as yet another four years of Trump looms before us or as we feel we can no longer have decent conversations with anyone who voted for him, Takes All Kinds is must-see. Reconciliation of all our differences is not an overnight process or even one guaranteed to work across the board. However, is it definitely hopeful to hear some of what is happening out there beyond the safety net we often feel here in the Bay Area as discovered and relayed so masterfully and sensitively by Oakland’s very own, Dan Hoyle.
Rating: 5 E, MUST SEE
Takes All Kinds continues in extension Fridays at 7:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 5 p.m. through February 22, 2025, at the San Francisco Marsh, 1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online at https://themarsh.org, by phone Monday – Friday 1:00 – 4:00 p.m., or by email at boxoffice@themarsh.org.
Photo Credits: Peter Prato
