We all know San Francisco is a bubble floating apart from the rest of the U.S. (especially the conservative red states), and we don’t claim to be typical Americans or, heaven forbid, what Sarah Palin calls “real Americans.” That’s fine with us.
We’ve got our own version of universal health coverage, we voted for gay marriage, we like vacationing in Third World countries with five-star lodging. The Bay Area is a wealthy and generous supporter of President Obama's re-election, so he visits us frequently. “Birthers”(who contend Obama was not born in the U.S.), the Ohioans and Floridians who ruined two presidential elections, Tea Partiers, Palin die-hards--we read about them in the New York Times, but thankfully we’ve never rubbed elbows with any. They are so foreign to us; why would we want to get acquainted with them?
As actor and writer Dan Hoyle discovers, we’re chicken to meet them. When the idea of connecting with Palin’s brand of “real Americans” surfaces among Hoyle and his organic-soy-latte-sipping pals, they propose that he go ahead: Venture beyond the Bubble by the Bay, hit the road and meet people over pie. Then return home and tell us all about it.
The result is The Real Americans, a 90-minute portrait of our fellow citizens in Small Town, USA. Hoyle’s one-man, one-act performance at the Marsh is hilarious, smart, sobering, complex, empathetic and eye-opening. His show's so good that it keeps getting extended--the latest is through April 14, 2012.
With a Ford camper van, U.S. flag T-shirts and polite openness, Hoyle travels the South, Appalachia and Midwest for 100 days in 2009. We witness him spending July 4 with three generations of a Creationist and military family in Texas, meeting an anti-war gun show dealer, taking to calling bar waitresses “sweetheart” and swigging Alabama moonshine with a Caucasian segregationist senior citizen. The elderly man’s black caregiver tells Hoyle matter-of-factly that racism trickles down the generations of an old Southern white family just as a penchant for foreign films might in an artistic family like his (Hoyle’s father is clown extraordinaire Geoff Hoyle). Hoyle hears more than once that “Obama is Muslim” and the president’s health care plan is “socialized medicine.”
Hoyle prays for a Texan teen-ager who's about to be deployed to Iraq, realizing he couldn’t do what the 19-year-old will have to. He wonders why Southern Democrats aren’t Democrats. The real Americans are honest and generous, cook him dinner and pray for him--how can he dislike them?
Vast swathes of the U.S. are withered, Hoyle finds. He can’t bond with people over pie because few roadside coffee shops still exist; instead, there are just lonely gas stations with pre-packaged junk food. Residents of America’s heartland are disgruntled and trapped, and it seems the situation will only worsen. The ever-ingenious Hoyle dreams up solutions--a “secular humanism road show,” or a ditty promoting logic, reason and science, perhaps? We in the audience laugh. But maybe his solutions aren’t so outlandish.
Hoyle is a master impersonator. Using only his voice, mime, body language and slight movements, he morphs into more than a dozen different characters--everyone from an eco-extremist SF hipster trying to “de-consume” to a wheelchair-bound codger to a tight-jawed vet and gun dealer who counsels young soldiers returning from Iraq. His interaction with a Midwestern auto mechanic and a confessional with Obama atop his van are particularly funny.
Hoyle has a knack for getting people to open up, and he listens closely. In Tings Dey Happen, his previous show about Nigeria’s oil politics, he re-enacted his encounters with tribal chiefs, Chevron executives, prostitutes, diplomats and slum-dwellers. Tings ran off Broadway and under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department, toured Nigeria.
Like Studs Terkel and Charles Kuralt, Hoyle in his newest work has probed an America that we know little about and understand less. He’s spared us a journey (which we were reluctant to take), so the least you can do is go to the Mission to meet the Americans he’s brought back.
The Real Americans
Dates:Through April 14, 2012, on Fridays and Saturdays.
Place: The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., near 22nd.
Tickets: $25-50.
For more information, check the Marsh website.
