Posted on 02/19/2005 10:50:28 AM PST by mountaineer
Election Day 2004 was a bitter pill for San Francisco actor Dan Hoyle. He'd just spent 10 days in Florida -- knocking on doors, working 16- hour days to defeat George W. Bush. When the votes came in and John Kerry's defeat became clear, Hoyle felt angry, then "incredibly sad" and finally numb.
"Life passed before my eyes, and I just sort of nodded. Because you can't interact any more: There are too many thoughts and emotions flooding through you."
So many on the left remain shell-shocked, locked in a tenuous, self- protective denial, in the wake of Nov. 2. But Hoyle, who at 24 is boyish, earnest and brimming with curiosity, is using his theater skills to wrestle down despair. In "Florida 2004: The Big Bummer," a one-man show running through March 4 at the Marsh, Hoyle turns defeat into therapy and finds absurdist humor in his 10-day Florida ordeal...
Displaying a gift for mime and vocal mimicry ... Hoyle populates "Florida 2004" with real-life characters he met during the campaign. He calls it "journalistic theater" -- a hybrid of reporting and play-making.
When he sat down to write "Florida 2004," "It just fell out of me," Hoyle says in the Noe Valley home he shares with his parents, comic actor Geoff Hoyle and San Francisco State lecturer Mary Winegarden.
Apart from a sober, emotional coda ("I'm so angry -- my parents worked too hard for me to inherit this"), Hoyle has fun with "The Big Bummer." He makes no secret of his dislike for Bush, but also lampoons the dewy-eyed flakes and raging egomaniacs who populated the get-out-the-vote efforts; the truck drivers, Vietnam vets and surly, unregistered voters he met while canvassing door-to-door.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Unemployed Actor Living with Parents Avoids Getting a Job, Bashes Bush OR
A Mime is a Terrible Thing to Waste
I hope Effin makes a cameo appearance in his performance art.
Bwaaaahahaha!!
Oh sheesh, what a moon bat.
Just kill yourself already and end your misery.
I didn't like it when Clinton won, I just got with my life. What is wrong with these fools?
We could forgive a young person for having this vision but this a man old enough to read, analyze and make informed decisions. Pathetic.
The title doesn't sum up Dan Hoyle's new solo piece as succinctly as may at first appear. Which is a good thing. It isn't a masterpiece of marketing. Hey, kids! Let's go see "The Big Bummer." I don't think so.
Worse yet, that's just the subtitle. The show Hoyle opened Thursday at the Marsh is actually called "Florida 2004: The Big Bummer." And who among us feels ready to re-experience that debacle? Well, it's time. Not so much because Hoyle transforms painful reality into a great theatrical experience as because his attempt is as refreshingly original as it is creatively courageous. And not because he manages to make sense of what happened -- no one else has -- but because of the impact of the lesson he draws from it.
"Florida" is Hoyle's second attempt at a kind of dramatic journalism, after the moderate success of his "Circumnavigator" at the Marsh last summer. In the waning weeks of the presidential campaign, Hoyle joined thousands of other volunteers in Florida in a huge get-out-the-Democratic-vote effort, the "No Voter Left Behind Plan." "Florida" is his report back to his home community.
It's a hastily put together effort. There's no director, though solo artist Charlie Varon (who directed "Circumnavigator") helped shape it. Much of "Florida" plays like raw footage. Less than an hour long, it could use further development to clarify and enhance some elements. But it also bears an unusually dynamic immediacy.
Hoyle, son of master comic actor Geoff Hoyle, opens in the midst of the telephone campaign, portraying both himself and a variety of the frustrating people he calls. He backtracks for a brief tour of his political background that culminates in a remarkable, energetic dance-mime-song encapsulating the '90s. Then he gets back to the present as an "army of Bay Area liberals parachutes into Florida" -- depicting everyone from fellow naive campaign workers, black and white potential voters, and his increasingly exhausted self to Michael Moore and the people protesting his appearance.
Some of the characterizations are crisply drawn, and all bear the stamp of authenticity, but most could be a bit better defined. The same holds true for the details of the campaign, especially Hoyle's provocative looks at problems within an ironically named Grassroots Campaigns Incorporated. It's as if he's in too great a hurry to cover too much ground -- which fits the reality of the campaign effort but doesn't fully exploit the advantages of his art form.
Even as one wishes Hoyle would develop a few characters and explore some of the elements in more depth, though, he paints an often comic and convincingly complex picture of the unexpectedly varied responses the campaign came up against. And of some of his fellow workers. In a second full-throttle mimed passage, he encapsulates the wearying, debilitating experience of door- to-door campaigning. And he builds nicely to the expectant excitement of the election itself.
That, surprisingly, is where "Florida" really pays off. Sitting in a bar with his already celebrating co-workers, Hoyle lets his elastic face portray the outcome in one prolonged, exquisitely rendered, eloquent double-take. The tragedy of a nation is distilled in that look.
As he explains in his program note, Hoyle created "Florida" specifically for a liberal Bay Area audience. He makes no attempt to discuss the issues -- which weren't well elaborated in the election anyway -- nor does he engage in post-mortem analyses such as the red herring of "moral values." What he does is come to a personal conclusion on the need to rededicate his energies to a long-term struggle. And in that, "Florida" achieves its own victory.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/12/DDG8OB9E8F1.DTL&type=performance
Reminds me of when Hillary Clinton "learned" of her husband's infidelity: "I gasped for air ..."
Dan Hoyle
Assuming he wasn't filling out voter registration cards for Mary Poppins, etc, he probably generated a couple of hundred votes for Bush. One of the things I found out doing door knocking for political campaigns is that in the wrong neighborhood, all you do is wake up the other side. A San Francisco actor (probably in full mime garb), would probably get quite a few conservatives out to vote.
Leave him alone...he's a mime. This is a mental health warning. Stay away from a mime!
Before the election I had die hard Democrats whispering to me that they would vote for Bush. Most anyone with good sense did.
Most people realised that any man who had a record like John Kerry claimed to have would sign a 180 in a flash.
Most people realised that 280 decorated Veterans , some of them Admirals trumped 5 Kerry crewman.
Most of them saw his Senate voting record and fell asleep .
Many men own Carhart jackets, they own them for rough use, they look like they have seen rough use, Kerrys looked like he bought it for the campaign. He did.
If seeing him in the bunny suit after seeing GWB in a flight suit didnt do it, You were ready for the rubber room.
Loser was only able to make 3 of the 5 stages of grief.
I love to read about these mentally deranged liberals who are teetering on the edge of the abyss of madness.
Denny Crane: "There are two places to find the truth. First God and then Fox News."
Whaaaaaaaaambulance alert!
I knew you would be. lol!
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