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
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.
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!
When the terrible sadness and depression of 11/2/04 becomes an intolerable burden, living in San Francisco is much, much better than Florida. Florida doesn't offer the freedom, salvation and Bushless bliss that the cool waters under the Golden Gate do. Ta-ta you stupid, commie scumbag!!
October 2004
Also on the move is actor and writer Dan Hoyle. Hoyle's home is on Sanchez Street, where he was reared by his parents--master comic Jeff Hoyle and Mary Winegarden, a lecturer at San Francisco State University. In 2002, he traveled the world after receiving a Circumnavigator Club grant to study the effects of economic globalization.
Circumnavigator, his solo performance chronicling that trip, debuted at Chashama Presents in New York in May and subsequently received an enthusiastic reception at the Marsh on Valencia Street. The initial five-week run in July and August was extended through Sept. 25. Then Hoyle took a two-week break to tour the show on college campuses while also working on a documentary film with his brother Jonah about swing states in the coming presidential election. Circumnavigator reopens for a two-week run at the Marsh, 1062 Valencia Street, Thursdays through Saturdays, Oct. 14 through 23. (Call 826-5750 for tickets, which are $10 to $14.)
Of his extended run, Hoyle says, "It feels pretty amazing because I knew I wanted to do a show when I left on my trip, but I was a 22-year-old college kid, and I didn't know that I could have success in the real world--I don't think anyone knows until they do--and so it's been hugely inspiring."
Hoyle, who recently graduated from Northwestern University with a double major in history and performance studies, has big aims. "I'm trying to bring the complexity of what people can do in journalism and writing into an entertaining form," he says. "This whole idea of lived experience as theater is exploding. There's a hunger for realness, and there's nothing more real than somebody recreating their own experiences, especially if it's about some real issues and not just about the crazy casseroles my grandmother used to make. Of course, you need both. Theater needs to work its magic in human stories. And that's the great challenge for me, bringing these nuanced things into theater in a way that's going to engage people. Instead of reading about something in the New York Times, they'll be seeing it and experiencing it," he says.
Hoyle attributes his success to his supportive family, and to his director Charlie Varon, who, he says, "has a genius for pulling out what is interesting and possibly amazing in somebody's lived experience." He is also grateful to the community of friends he's known since he was a kid, who packed the house early on and created a buzz. In January, Hoyle will leave for Nigeria to study oil politics for a year on a Fulbright scholarship. Will it result in another show? You bet.
http://tinyurl.com/3rqya
So this guy is Dan Rather's replacement then?
If pinheads like this bozo put half the effort into growing up as they put into sobbing over politics they'd turn out to be pretty good people.
Oh yeah, I want to just immerse myself in the insight and profundity of guy who lives in his parents' garage.
Sounds as though he suffers from a spastic colon....