Thursday, November 12, 1998
Hip-hop play targets L.A. youth
THEATER: Music culture inspires one-man show, reaches diverse
audience
By Cheryl Klein
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
The tendency is to build up an immunity …
"No, I would not like to see a wacky new comedy starring Jackie
Chan and a monkey."
"No, I cannot protect abused women and children today."
"No, I do not want to join acronym-of-the-week club."
But if a Bruin Walk loiterer approaches you with a 4-by-6 inch
card depicting a hip-hopper caught mid-rant and unleashes a rap
about, "You gotta go check out this show, this is why, it’s about
you. Go. It’s $10, boom," give it a listen.
Because the thing is, Danny Hoch (the hip-hopper on the flyer)
is listening to you.
His solo show, "Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop" previewed as a
"progress in work" at UCLA last year and is now enjoying a
five-week run at the Actors’ Gang in slightly more solidified form.
What Hoch terms "a play with a cast of one" is a montage of
vignettes starring 10 diverse and eccentric characters  from
a white Montana teen with gangsta rap delusions to Danny Hoch,
probably the only actor to turn down a part on "Seinfeld" (they
wanted him to play a caricaturized Latino pool man).
But each is the product of a lifetime spent with ears perked to
his surroundings; his native New York supplies plenty of dialects
to speak in and problems to speak about. Hoch attributes his ear
for language to his mother, a speech pathologist.
"There was no linguistic standard when I was growing up," Hoch
says, "The standard was a myriad of different types of English and
Spanish and Patois.
"It was (my mother’s) job to teach people to reclaim their
language  people who had lost their voice boxes due to a
stroke or a car accident or police gunshot wounds or cancer," Hoch
says. And the irony was that a lot of these people, their languages
were not English. So I think a lot of that gave me a sense of
tremendous value in listening."
The voices that speak through his green-eyed Caucasian frame are
mesmerizing in their range, honesty and humor. And once the actor
himself gets going  on the prison industrial complex or
Hollywood executives  it’s hard not to get swept up by the
cadence and social clarity of his speech.
He likens himself to the most ancient form of thespian, the solo
performer who also served as politician, educator and even
religious figure.
Indeed, Hoch is something of a hip-hop preacher, fighting the
elitist bastions of traditional regional theater in order to give
his people more than a cameo in the artistic world.
There is no question of respect  the New York Times calls
"Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop" "vibrant," "dizzying" and a bevy of
other adjectives that would assure most performers that their work
here was done. But Hoch can take or leave the Times reviews, but
more important are the ads.
His former producers wanted to spend a very flattering sum of
money to convince newspaper readers to shell out $35 for tickets.
Hoch wasn’t keen on attracting the upper middle-class crowd of
seniors that tend to fill out theaters at the expense of the very
people he was depicting.
"Our generation has never been invited to the theater," Hoch
says. "We’ve been dragged to the theater by our teachers to see
some rap version of ‘Hamlet.’ As if we’re supposed to relate to it
because it’s in rap. Or we’re dragged to some boring Samuel Beckett
play or some ridiculous Tom Stoppard play that has nothing to do
with us."
And as much as he appreciates accolades from liberal
grandparents, he says that members of his generation "don’t feel
comfortable sitting around 45-year-olds from the suburbs who are
dressed up on a Friday night."
"We want to chill and relax and be entertained, but at the same
time, not stupid, Hoch says. "We don’t want to feel stupid; we want
to think."
After what he deems a "tragedy" with the Los Angeles run of his
previous show "Some People" (a small but loyal group of young
people paid $20 night after night only to be drowned out by older
theater goers), the street team was born.
Actually, the concept itself was nothing new. Record companies
have been sending spokespeople out to hawk CDs via word-of-mouth
and flyers passed hand to hand for years. But in theater, the idea
is as radical as the show itself. Hoch also insisted on a $10
student price for all shows.
"I’m not like some super capitalist marketer here, but I know
that when McDonald’s wants to market a new burger, they don’t
charge $45. They charge 99 cents, and then they get everybody
addicted," Hoch says.
In other words, Hoch is attempting to speak to the mainstream
without succumbing to its downfalls, a difficult task for an artist
currently trying to market his first film.
Making "White Boys," a movie that asks the question ‘What are
black entertainers saying to white America?’ required Hoch to delve
into the chasm of studio strategizing that is Hollywood.
He wasn’t anxious to deal with the same folks who criticized his
television script about a racially mixed group of high school
students who "save" themselves despite the absence of Annie Potts
by telling them "America is mostly white people  they don’t
want to watch that."
But "White Boys" navigated its way into production and awaits a
spring release. Once again, though, Hoch relies on hip-hop habits
in order to reach his audience.
"If I left that film in Hollywood’s hands, forget it. It would
either never get released, or it would only play in art houses, and
it’s so not an art film," Hoch says.
"So I’m getting a record company to market the film the way
they’d market an album. Hollywood, I don’t think even knows what to
do with that situation. Like I said, we don’t need them."
And there you have it: Hoch’s unrelenting faith is not only in
himself but in his generation. He feels that today’s youth stands
as a community in itself, united across class and ethnic lines more
than any previous generation.
He knows it’s not easy.
"The same people I went to high school with at the High School
for the Performing Arts who were like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go to
L.A. and make a lot of money, and then we’re going to come back to
New York, and we’re going to change the world and have revolution
in the streets. It’s 10 years later, and a lot of those people are
out there in L.A. paying off their houses in Hollywood Hills,
paying off their BMW."
But Hoch insists that "whether you listen to rap or not, you’re
in the hip-hop generation, if you’re 15 to 30. You are. Period.
Even if you live in Arkansas and you think Ice Cube is an asshole
and you listen to Leonard Skynard all day, you’re still in the
hip-hop generation."
Which beats Generation X as nomenclature any day.
"Because," Hoch says, "hip-hop is the most powerful, the most
effective and the last culture of resistance in this country."
He pauses. "I said a mouthful."
Thank goodness someone did.
THEATER: Danny Hoch’s "Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop" runs
through Dec. 13 at the Actors’ Gang in Hollywood. Tickets are $25,
$10 for students. For more information, call (213) 628-2772. Hoch
will perform part of his show followed by a question and answer
session for UCLA students on Nov. 18. For more information about
this event, call Rosie Wong at the School of Theater, Film and
Television, (310) 206-0426.DERRICK KUDO/Daily Bruin
Danny Hoch is the star of a one-man show called "Jails,
Hospitals and Hip-Hop," which runs at the Actors’ Gang through Dec.
13.
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