All Those Voices Buzzing In Their Heads

One of the earliest indicators of acting talent is a child's ability to play a piece of music by ear or impersonate the people who cross his path each day. Impersonations quickly become an easy way to attract attention, make friends, and are a lot more fun to perform than being asked by your parents to play your musical instrument for the relatives.

As a person nurtures and develops a talent for mimicking others, they start to acquire a toolkit of voices and mannerisms. As the host of Inside the Actors Studio, James Lipton always encouraged his guests to demonstrate their skills at impersonating famous people.


Performers like Rich Little, Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Caliendo, and Robin Williams were famous for their ability to impersonate numerous actors, politicians, and celebrities. Carol Channing (who recently died at the age of 97) was noted for her impressions of people like Marlene Dietrich, Sophie Tucker, and Tallulah Bankhead (in her late 80s, Channing was still making hay with impressions she had been performing for nearly half a century).






One's ability to mimic easily recognizable voices can develop from a party trick into a career. Christine Pedi has gained notoriety in theatre circles for her uncanny ability to mock Broadway's leading ladies in song.


Dana Carvey (who used to imitate President George H.W. Bush on Saturday Night Live) later became friends with the man he mocked. In the following clip, Kevin Spacey can be seen imitating Al Pacino face to face.


For many people, Seth MacFarlane's dexterity with voices for his cartoon characters has become a never-ending source of joy. In this segment from an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, MacFarlane demonstrates what a keen ear and smooth tongue can do to keep audiences in stitches.

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For much of the 20th century, Margaret Mead's work as a cultural anthropologist helped many Americans understand that tribal cultures in faraway places like Samoa and Papua New Guinea revealed a great deal about the human condition and how much can be learned from people whose lives seem vastly different from our own. Part of Mead's field research taught her that nursing infants according to the baby's (rather than the mother's) schedule produced better results -- an observation that she passed on to her pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock. Mead also helped many people understand that the range of human sexuality and gender roles is much broader than most prefer to believe.

As monologists weave the characters they create into their shows, some take their cues from the art of ventriloquism by showing how deftly they can carry on a conversation in multiple voices. Others use their experiences from work and travel to form a narrative they can deliver to an audience. In his past one-man shows ("Tings Dey Happen," "The Real Americans," "Each and Every One") Dan Hoyle has shown great skill in weaving the experiences he gained while traveling through Nigeria and the United States into oral tapestries that create memorable portraits of people who might normally be overlooked.

What boosts Hoyle's portraits to a different level from many monologists is his phenomenal skill with foreign languages and regional accents, the strength of his writing, and the collaborative skills through which his shows develop. Though some may characterize his process as sculpting living statues with a text-based form of clay, there is also a sculptural element in his process of chipping away at a huge amount of research until an arresting person emerges from the raw material in a multi-layered portrait of surprising depth.

Dan Hoyle in a scene from his new show
entitled Border People (Photo by: Peter Prato)

Hoyle's new show (which recently premiered at The Marsh) caught a few members of the audience off guard because he had not written himself into Border People as a character or narrator. Instead, he presents a series of 11 meticulously crafted and surprisingly nuanced vignettes. Among the characters he brings to life are:

• Noe, an undocumented gay man from a small town in Mexico who has been battling HIV and cancer. Since entering the United States, he has struggled with drug abuse, spent time in prison, come out of the closet, and found love in Las Vegas. Following his partner's death, Noe was deported and sent back to Mexico to live with his family (who don't really know him or understand that he is gay).
• Zainab loved teaching American literature to her students in Iraq but, since entering the United States as a refugee, has come to the curious realization that it's much easier to make friends among the Amish residents of Lancaster, Pennsylvania (where she is the only woman who owns a computer and a smartphone) than in the other American communities where she has lived.
• Hani is a Palestinian man who was working as a contractor in Saudi Arabia but fled that country on short notice after the Islamic religious police accused him of not being sufficiently devout. After starting a new life in Merced, California, Donald Trump's election to the Presidency spiked a rise in xenophobia. Fearing for their safety, Hani and his family decided it would be better to seek asylum in Canada. At the border, an American immigration official asked Hani what he was fleeing from. Hani's answer was simple: "You, bro."

Dan Hoyle in a scene from his new show
entitled Border People (Photo by: Peter Prato)

• Lopez is a border patrol officer in Southern Arizona who hopes to become a stand-up comedian. After pulling Dan over (because he's driving a rental car with Phoenix license plates), Lopez tries to practice his jokes for Hoyle.
• Jarrett (who jokes about being the black version of Rick Santorum) is a well-educated, conservative African American man who grew up in a a predominantly white and Korean town in suburban New Jersey. He's now living in his grandmother's apartment in the South Bronx which, because his partner is white, necessitates a lot of code switching. Jarrett likes to dress in business casual, wearing sweater vests and Air Jordan sneakers to confuse people who can't wrap their minds around the fact that he is a nationally-recognized African-American chess master.
• Gareth is not the man one might assume on first meeting. A gay pagan who embraces a survivalist ideology while raising goats on his ranch near the Arizona/Mexico border, he acts swiftly and surprisingly whenever he discovers a Mexican refugee on his property.
• Hoyle also portrays an insecure teenage refugee who is taken to a nice restaurant for her birthday. When encouraged by her mother to order dessert as part of the celebration, she is shocked to discover an item on the menu entitled "chocolate cheesecake." Confused about how something can be both chocolate cake and cheesecake, she is reluctant to treat herself out of fear that she is not worthy of such a luxury.

Dan Hoyle in a scene from his new show
entitled Border People (Photo by: Peter Prato)

Because Hoyle's acting talent so strongly resembles an octopus or chameleon's ability to camouflage itself by blending in with its surroundings, he can be standing three feet away from you while completely disappearing into a character. Hoyle may brush a bit of his hair in a different direction, roll up the sleeves of his black T-shirt, slouch against a wall to take on the pose of a male hustler, or soften his body language to impersonate a woman but, as he moves from one character to another, you probably won't see Dan Hoyle. The best way I can describe the experience is to suggest listening to a recording of Modest Mussourgsky's famous Pictures at an Exhibition (which was composed for piano in 1874 and orchestrated by Leopold Stokowski in 1939).


Having taken a journalistic approach to creating his extremely personal style of performance art, Hoyle explains that his Border People project began "when I was an artist-in-residence at Columbia University in New York. I was then chosen by Baltimore Center Stage to be their Spring Lab Artist, where my longtime collaborator (Charlie Varon) and I were able to workshop the initial material. I then traveled to Trinity College Dublin, where I was an artist-in-residence working on this new material.

Much of Border People was created in response to the growing sense of tribalism Hoyle has witnessed in American society. Some of his characters are based on one person, but most are composites of people he has met during his travels. By talking to refugees "who don't take their citizenship for granted," Hoyle seeks to find the sweet spot between political talking points and genuine human interest stories. As he explains:

"I've been to refugee safe houses on the northern border in Canada, where all these folks are fleeing to Canada because they're more likely to get asylum there. I've gone to deported migrant shelters in Mexico. I did a ride-around with border patrol for a day. I met up with ranchers. I went and met with deported veterans (former American soldiers who got deported after their service because they had permanent residency and got convicted of a felony, most of which were nonviolent). There's a guy in my show who is totally American, doesn't even speak Spanish, and is living in Ciudad Juarez. These are hard people to bullet-point. They embody a fluidity and hybridity of culture that I have so often experienced in more than 15 years of doing ethnographic field research -- a complexity and nuance of story that seems so under attack now. Their stories are beacons of beautiful truth in a sea of anti-immigrant rhetoric."

Dan Hoyle in a scene from his new show
entitled Border People (Photo by: Peter Prato)

Perhaps the best piece of advice I can offer audiences attending a performance of Border People lies within Stephen Sondheim's lyrics for this song from 1965's Do I Hear A Waltz?


Performances of Border People continue through February 23 at The Marsh (click here for tickets).