Dan Hoyle, you should know, can act the pants off his characters. (Relax; that’s figurative.) In his show “Border People,” produced by Working Theater at A.R.T./New York Theaters, he hopscotches among ages, races, ethnicities and genders. His subject is boundaries, most of them national. The show takes him to either side of the United States’s northern and southern limits, with stops in the Bronx.
Hoyle (“The Real Americans,” “Tings Dey Happen”) practices a loose form a documentary theater that he calls “the journalism of hanging out.” He meets people, in encounters that are sometimes planned and sometimes random, records conversations with their permission, then fashions characters and monologues from the audio. His style drifts from verbatim, but he does, he says, try to meet with his subjects again, showing them the speeches they inspired, which likely keeps him honest.
At rest, Hoyle has an affable, everydude quality. Yet his voice and face are unusually plastic. He can raise and lower pitch, narrow and widen eyes and lips as each role demands. Working without props or changes of costume, he plays Jarret, a navy veteran who owns an Upper West Side juice cart and describes the “back male crisis of authenticity”; Mike, a former marine deported to Ciudad Juárez; Jawid, an Afghanistan-born high school student who follows his family to Canada; Zainab, an Iraqi woman who now lives in Amish country (“I may have hijab but at least I have cellphone and refrigerator! I’m not the weirdest one!”); and half a dozen others. If he struggles occasionally with the Middle Eastern accents, he crafts each portrait with care and occasional athleticism. As the show goes on, his nose pinks; his hair dampens.
But in “Border People” the dexterous acting and deft writing tend to eclipse the larger themes, in part because those themes keep eluding Hoyle. The script feels like two plays roughly sewn together, one about external borders and another about internal, identitarian ones. With Hoyle as the thread, the work becomes increasingly self-congratulatory, a pat on the back for his empathy and cultural border crossing.
“Dang,” he has a border patrol officer named Lopez say, admiringly, “you been to all types of borders.” Larry, a black janitor who lives in the South Bronx, tells him he isn’t like other white guys: “You comfortable, you got your black past, you part of the community.” Yet it’s largely that whiteness and that maleness and that United States passport that allows him to hang out in the first place. In the play, directed unobtrusively by Nicole A. Watson, Hoyle fails to reckon with this privilege or explore how it colors his interactions with others.
“Border People” feels like a master class, but I’m unsure about what it’s meant to teach, other than an admiration for Hoyle’s craft. Yes, there’s a through line about shared humanity and shared desires — for safety, for respect, for love. Larry says it best: “We all one in the same.” But the solo form risks flattening individual identity into a kind of performance, which might not sit well with the characters who take ethnicity to heart. And the tidy monologues are overwhelmingly sympathetic. Hoyle has already done the work, hard or easy, of negotiating difference. What’s left for us but to sit back and applaud him?
Border People
Through Feb. 22 at the Gural Theater, A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, theworkingtheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
