“Every now and then you get the person whose only experience with a solo performer is a stand up comedian. And then when they realize something’s funny and something’s not funny their brain can’t process it so they immediately say “who the fuck is this white guy?””

~ Danny Hoch

By Catzie Vilayphonh  |  Send to Friend

Before you knew him as the snitch in We Own The Night, or Timmy Hilnigger in Bamboozled, or the wack wannabe-black midwest rapper in Whiteboyz, Danny Hoch was, and still is, an accomplished theater actor, playwright and director. The first time I saw Danny was 10 years ago at the Painted Bride for his one-man play Jails, Hospitals and Hip Hop. The second time was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a spoken word poetry event where we were onstage together. Whether performing an entire show or reading from his book, Danny's talent to portray characters in well-written monologues is so effective that their human element comes through without caricaturizing stereotypes. He's not just some white guy that can impersonate different people. And while he's not touring the world with his theater work, his writings on hip-hop, race and class can be found in The Village Voice, New York Times, and Harper's, while his Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop book is already in its second printing. Not to be outdone, in 2000 he founded the Hip-Hop Theater Festival which has presented and re-introduced the world to hip-hop generation plays.

Danny's newest play, Taking Over, premiered at this year's HHTF at New York City’s Public Theater. I got to see him again in action and afterwards we chatted about displacement of people, the difference between performance art, hip-hop theater and spoken word, and what it means when a New Yorker doesn't feel like a New Yorker anymore.

Catz: Let’s talk about your show, Taking Over, which is about gentrification, specifically in New York City. I read an interview where you said you felt like a tourist in your own home, in your own city, but hasn’t New York always been that city where people are always visiting and you always … put on a show?

Danny: [Laughs] I think for people who are not from here, this is a place to go as a tourist, but it’s not a place where actual people live, it’s not a real community. There aren’t any real communities here, you’re an outsider. Kind of like, you’re given that. And I think it’s been like that probably for the second half of the 20th century. Does that answer your question?

Catz: Sort of … You said before that you’re a New Yorker living in New York but you don’t feel like one, is that sort of in the same context?

Danny: Let’s forget New York and just call it a big city like San Francisco or like Philadelphia or Chicago. There are two major groups that are flocking to your city. One of those groups are immigrants. And I want to distinguish here: Immigrants come with no money, yet they work and contribute to the infrastructure of the city that they move to and they build communities there. So they come and they make a footprint in the city that is a footprint of sweat, not of money. The other group that is flocking to you are Americans, and often as it is in the past five years, Europeans. Those folks are coming with money. They may not be rich but collectively they are rich so they make a tremendous economic footprint in your city and they come with very little sweat. So what happens is, you’ve been living in this community of your big city, whether it’s New York or not, and you’ve been asking for a hospital for 30 years and you don’t get one, and you’ve been asking that your school be repaired and you don’t get one, and you’ve been asking for a traffic light for 15 years because children in your neighborhood got killed by cars at the same intersection and you don’t get a traffic light. And then the Americans and Europeans show up, they’ve been here for a year and in two weeks they get a bike lane. What’s wrong with this picture? There’s something that’s happened that is unprecedented before colonialism: a huge influx of people with money are changing the landscape of our community and we are being erased and our stories are being erased.

Catz: What is your process when you’re coming up with characters? Do you interview people, do you observe people around you or do you imagine all of these people in a story and this one fits this person who believes in this idea?

Danny: I don’t interview people because this is not journalistic for me, it’s personal. So as a writer and as an actor I’ve always been naturally observant of my community and things going on around me, people who inspire me or make me angry. So they all wind up in my show. Each of the characters is not based on one person, I would say each character is probably based on 5 to 10 people, so they’re composites.

Catz: Do you ever get the questions, especially outside of New York, where people may not be fully familiar with your entire resume, about you being a white guy that’s doing hip-hop, playing these ethnic characters?

DH: Back in the '90s, when I guess identity politics was really hot, I used to get those questions.

Catz: But not anymore?

Danny: No because I think it becomes really clear that it’s not a minstrel show and it’s not stand-up comedy. Every now and then you get the person whose only experience with a solo performer is a stand up comedian. And then when they realize something’s funny and something’s not funny their brain can’t process it so they immediately say “who the fuck is this white guy?” But I don’t think that’s what it’s really about. I think it’s that we’ve been dumbed down in American culture to think that things are either comedy or tragedy and they can’t be both.

Catz: Can you tell me what you are, because your NY Spanish is so on point?

Danny: I’m a fourth generation New Yorker, of a long line of Brownsville and Lower East Side Jews from Eastern Europe.

Catz: And your Spanish, you just picked it up from growing up?

Danny: I picked it up from growing up. My mother’s a speech pathologist and all of her patients in the hospital were Spanish speaking. I spent a lot of time in Cuba and Puerto Rico, so I can speak fluent Spanish.

Catz: You decided in one point of the show that one of the characters would be yourself. Did you ever think it was a dangerous idea to be Danny Hoch and tell people what you really think?

Danny: Um, I think it’s dangerous for audience members [Laughs]. Because I think that the audience feels protected and all of a sudden they become unprotected when I come out. In most plays, you never really see the playwright, the playwright writes plays and other actors perform them. People know that they’re in this extended belief that they know the actor is actually not the character but here’s a show where the actor is the writer, and people are wondering “Wow he’s so engrossed in this character is that really him? No that can’t be him. Oh, is this really him, that can’t be him” I think it’s important; it’s such a hot potato issue for people to see who the playwright is.

Catz: You’ve been doing this for a really long time now, this performance art/theater--

Danny: It’s not performance art. Performance art is like Blue Man Group.

Catz: Okay, it’s not performance art. But this theatre/solo monologue thing you’ve been doing it for so long. And then a couple years ago spoken word poetry came along, had a popular rise, and then you started the Hip Hop Theater Festival. Even though you had been doing this all along, all of a sudden rap artists, not that they couldn’t before, but now, there’s this venue where they could be poets, and spoken word poets could be theater performers and “performances artists” could be spoken word poets. It’s almost like all of these different genres which had been separated before became interchangeable and indistinguishable.

Danny: It’s been interesting and liberating to see the phenomenon of spoken word and spoken word theater and hip-hop theater but I actually think people were in denial. Rappers were in denial that they were doing theater to begin with. Rap and all that was already theater. A lot of people in hip-hop, a lot of marginalized people, to begin with, feel like theater is not for us, that theater is this rich people entertainment or the ruling class. But really poor people invented theater and rich people co-opted it and if we just look at all of our ancient traditions wherever we come from in the world, theater has been around for thousands and thousands of years and I just feel like spoken word has been confused. Rap is rap, its already theater, how do we make it better? How do we expand on the elements of hip-hop which are incredible, there’s only so much you can do with it.

Catz: Do you feel your art got gentrified?

DH: Yea, they’re asking me to gentrify it right now, they’re still asking me to put more white characters in the show.


To check out more on Danny Hoch's work, go to www.dannyhoch.com.