Cultural reality

Play it out

“Centuries ago, when two travellers met on a road in the middle of nowhere, they’d stop and ask, ‘what’s new?’ and learn a huge amount. Sure now we can just look it up online, but there’s a social aspect that we are missing,” says American actor-playwright Dan Hoyle, marvelled at the human connect that India’s eastern city Kolkata offers.

Dan Hoyle, whose recent solo show, ‘The Real Americans’, has struck a chord with his home audience and became a runaway hit, could be spotted hanging out in nondescript Kolkata street tea stalls, breathing in a slice of India. Crisscrossing India for creative inspiration, it was in Kolkata that the American found a city where people “live, eat and breathe” ideas.

“The tea stall culture in Kolkata is fascinating. That you can buy rounds of tea (for peanuts) makes sense. The city has been blowing my mind,” says Hoyle, who held the audience at The Park hotel in Kolkata to thrall with the performance of ‘The Real Americans’.

Whether Hoyle’s reference to middle America and red necks (a word that was a slang for uneducated farmers and later came to be known as a bigot or a self-identifier in USA) was relatable to all of the audience or not, he certainly bonded with the gathering with his emoting.

The New York Times called Hoyle “both a first-rate actor and journalist”, and his work has been compared favourably to Anna Deveare-Smith, John Leguizamo and Sarah Jones.

“I think everyone should go out and have their own trips,” says the young actor who overcame economic hardship to make journeys across USA and discover what real Americans think and feel. “Get out of your comfort zone, it is rewarding,” he says, hoping that his show on the American experience would inspire people, especially youngsters, to do so.

He says, while in India, he consumed everything and was constantly gathering. “I was there to do research,” says Hoyle, who is also a journalist. Hoyle says he wants to know why newspapers in the US are folding up, while they are booming in India.

Hoyle’s ‘The Real Americans’ enjoyed a 10-month sold-out run at The Marsh in San Francisco, and played to sold-out audiences at various places across America. It was dubbed the “Best Solo Show” by SF Weekly, a Top Ten play by the San Francisco Chronicle, and was nominated for a Bay Area Theater Critics Circle award for outstanding solo show.

Armed with only a van and a tape recorder, Dan Hoyle had travelled through small towns in search of the real Americans. The output is the one-man play where he impersonates some 15 people ranging from a former drug dealer to a self-described redneck to his own San Francisco hipster friends.

What he has taken back from India to his life in America is the everyday spirituality that permeates Indian life.

“There were some people who told me that perception is close to god, and so, the more deeply you perceive, the closer you are to god. As someone whose livelihood and craft is based on close observation, this was profound to me and a validation of a life practice that I never had words for. So at different moments throughout the day, I try to stop and make myself look more closely, hear more sharply, experience the totality of the moment,” says Hoyle.

For now, Hoyle is analysing his Indian experience before it comes out in the shape of any creative production.