Like Manhattan If the Sewers Didn’t Work

Through performance and perseverance, Dan Hoyle brings the Niger Delta to life onstage.

Dressed all in black and standing on the black painted stage, the thing that makes Dan Hoyle pop is his white skin. Speaking in a West African-English dialect, he gives voice to Nigerian villagers: an oil worker, a militant, and even a prostitute. A Texas drawl morphs him into an oil executive from the American west and a Scottish brogue brings to life a defeated European tycoon.

All were on display last winter on stage at Culture Project in Soho, in a show called “Tings Dey Happen.” This was a 90 minute emotional rollercoaster, a one-man show written by Hoyle in which he portrays more than 20 characters, educating the audience about oil politics in Nigeria and the nitty-gritty of globalization. Hopelessness and ambition are in constant juxtaposition; events unfold at a manic pace.

“Tings” is based on the year (2005) that Hoyle spent in Nigeria as a Fulbright scholar, observing how corrupt oil flow stations—transport arenas for crude oil extracted from offshore rigs—affect society. What he created is unlike anything most audience members have seen, but that’s because Hoyle has experienced what they can only imagine.

The Niger Delta has probably never been featured in Condé Nast Traveler. A character in the play says about the region, “Even black people don’t want to come back here no more.” With frequent kidnappings and attacks on the oil infrastructure, the area doesn’t attract many outside visitors, making Hoyle’s trip that much more unique.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation at about 140 million. It gained independence from the United Kingdom October 1, 1960 and 16 years of contentious military rule followed. The country has a history of terrible civil war and longstanding ethnic and religious tension.

It is the world’s 12th highest oil producer and 8th highest oil exporter, producing 3 million barrels of oil a day. Most of the petroleum is shipped to the United States. Former military rulers were over-dependent on the oil sector, mismanaging and corrupting the economy. Influential major oil companies serve as a corrupt government proxy (as a militant in Hoyle’s play puts it: “We go and protest Shell because we know that’s going to make news. We go and protest government and nobody cares”). Democratic elections are a recent, violent phenomenon and much of local politics is dictated by the wills of the Oil Majors: Shell, Chevron, Exxon, Agip, and Elf.

Failed attempts at coups and reforms have led many Nigerians to believe change and stability is not viable. They’ve acclimated to the corrupt government, finding ways to make it work for them. “It’s like the devil you know,” Hoyle says, “is the devil you don’t.”

Dan Hoyle looks shockingly young to be playing in his third one-man show, off-Broadway no less. He has the athletic, attractive look like the slick frat bud who’d be a guy’s best friend and a girl’s one night stand, but what he also boasts is the uncanny ability to morph physically and vocally into characters far removed from his own life. His base is in San Francisco, where performance and intellect is in his blood—his father Geoff Hoyle is an actor and comedian and his mother Mary Winegarden is a lecturer at San Francisco State. At Northwestern University, Dan Hoyle double majored in Performance Studies and History. Much of his inspiration comes from writer-performers like Sarah Jones and Danny Hoch.

His first solo show, “Circumnavigator,” was based on an around-the-world trip to eight countries for three weeks to study globalization. The second show he created, “Florida 2004: The Big Bummer,” was based on his 10-day volunteer stint on John Kerry’s campaign trail. Both played in his native San Francisco. His essays have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle and he wrote for SportsIllustrated.com about his summer as a ballpark peanut vendor.

After a professor forwarded him a New York Times article about the violence in Nigeria, Hoyle applied for a Fulbright grant, awarded to applicants based on academic merit and leadership potential who propose international educational trips. Hoyle proposed the idea of studying the effects of oil politics in Nigeria, and turning the whole thing into his third show. The day he received notice that he’d gotten the Fulbright grant, several workers were killed outside a flow station in Escravos, Nigeria. Nonetheless, his plane took off March 2005.

Hoyle had traveled to more than 30 countries; Nigeria was by far the hardest to live in. How was life in the oil country? “It’s like Manhattan if the sewers didn’t work,” he says, “and the electricity was faulty and the roads were only paved in key places and there’s a lot more police around.”

He found Nigeria dysfunctional. “It’s like a party where the dog ate the cake, and the lights are out, and there’s a hole in the floor but people are still partying,” he said. And what else were they going to do? Things may be run down, and society may be broken, but as Hoyle said, they all just want to have a good time.

And while there’s a lot to be learned about the issues imbedded in “Tings,” it’s ultimately a show about the people. For Hoyle, the Nigerians were an accessible case study. “They have the gift of gab,” he said. “They are some of the best storytellers anywhere.” Most of all, they wanted Hoyle to get it right. “Anyone who told their story felt like justice was on their side,” he said.

He said as he encountered the people, he could see them coming to life on stage. He blended the roles of actor and researcher. “Part of the time I was trying to figure out what was happening,” he said. “And part of the time I was trying to figure out how to become these people.” Some days he went out with a notebook, some days he went out with a mini disc recorder, and some days he just walked and absorbed what was happening around him.

In the show, he encapsulates the bombastic pride of the militants and the vulnerable shyness of the worker he befriended. Early on, the audience is introduced to Cosi, a sniper Hoyle met on the Niger River delta, who kills people to earn money for college. He left his family when he was 14, hustled jobs in the city of Lagos, was in the Navy, quit, stole his two guns, went to Nembe Creek—roughly 250 miles away—and signed up as a fighter. In the whirlwind of the show’s revolving door of characters, the scenes featuring Cosi are the most compelling.

Cosi is controlled. He’s hard-edged. He’s vulnerable and scared, but he’s sure of himself. Hoyle’s physically loud performance shrinks into itself when he becomes Cosi. “Sometimes you have to kill some people to have your own dreams,” Cosi says in the play. As Cosi, Hoyle is always seated stage right, leaning on his knees, eyes piercing into the audience as he delivers his lines.

“Cosi’s hard (to portray) because emotionally sometimes you have to look at the audience being in New York and you’re trying to be in Nigeria,” Hoyle said.

His bond with Cosi is deep. While Hoyle was visiting Nembe Creek, outside a Shell flow station, Cosi played host, sharing his bed with him. He understood what Hoyle needed, helping him to gather sound effects and introducing him to people.

“We couldn’t be from farther places in the world,” Hoyle said. But one hot night, seated at stools at a small outdoor bar, Hoyle reached an understanding. “We’re sitting there and there was this sort of silence and it just struck me that it was profound that I was there experiencing this, and I felt kind of connected to him. And we just kind of felt like two guys hanging out on a Friday night, you know?”

And while Cosi’s scenes were riveting by nature of his character, one particular scene toward the end—a nearly incomprehensible one—captivates because Hoyle speaks in near-perfect, heavy pidgin. “Pidgin” is a unique dialect of English used in some regions of Nigeria. “What I hope the audience does there is really blur their ears and focus their eyes and just try to take in and feel 100 percent in Nigeria,” he said.

For Hoyle, learning pidgin was as much a means of survival as a tool for his play. When he was stopped at checkpoints by rifle-wielding guards, often the only reason he passed through was because he could negotiate in the native language. He said daily life in Nigeria was a constant dance of status-negotiation. If someone had higher status, Hoyle’s physical carriage had to be small and demure, vocally and physically. Sometimes he’d expand and intimidate to assert himself.

Other times the negotiation was an internal debate: whether to remain in the country or leave with the notes he had already made. Several months into his stay, he contracted malaria after he stopped taking preventive pills because they intensified his mood and tripped out his dreams. The Niger Delta is a swampy region, making mosquito bites practically inevitable. “It was hard to be sick in that kind of environment because you don’t feel taken care of the way you’re used to,” Hoyle said.

It is fascinating how believable Hoyle is while portraying the Africans, despite his skin color. Still, some audience members wondered how his color affected the stories he was told and the overall picture he portrays on stage.

“Everywhere I went, in every local dialect, I was called out for my whiteness,” said Rachel Ishofsky, an NYU student who studied in Ghana for a semester. “Strangers would point at me and smile. Some would ask for gifts. Others would want to touch my skin. Racial difference isn’t just a social construct there. White skin means that you’re from the world of the oppressors, or the liberators, or even just the land of Coca
Cola and MTV.”

Yet what Hoyle does in the play is to make skin color irrelevant. In a show ostensibly about racial issues and societal struggles, “Tings” becomes about the universality of the human heart—hearts have no skin color. “The fact that Dan played these characters, that he, in all his whiteness, took on their lives and problems, was a message to everyone in that room,” Ishofsky said. “We don’t need to buy into the system.”

“The fact that he’s white creates subtext,” said Dave Meyers, an audience member of African-American descent. Meyers, who applied for a Fulbright grant to study in Africa, decided to refocus his proposal to cover similar issues to those raised in “Tings.” “Seeing a white person capture that emotion really starts to guilt you, especially since it’s the Westerners who are ruining the Africans’ lives,” he said.

Charlie Varon, the show’s director, agrees that Hoyle offers new insight into what’s going on in a part of the world Westerners often ignore. “Dan takes Nigeria on its own terms,” he said. “It is a country full of energy and hustle, and he’s able to embody that on stage. He commits fully to Nigerian speech, Nigerian body language, Nigerian energy, and the Nigerian way of seeing the world.”

But Hoyle maintains that his show is not meant to make a “charity case” out of the situation in Africa. In the final monologue, a Nigerian official says, “You feel sad for Africa? Don’t feel sad for Africa. We don’t need your pity.”

No, Hoyle is much more humble about his objectives. He’s offering a new way to think: to think like a black man, think like a Nigerian, think differently.

“I kind of have this privilege with the play for 90 minutes to give people this new vocabulary, kind of explain it and try to teach you Nigeria from Nigeria,” he said. “And not just teach you, show you. And if you want to come, you can come. And if you don’t, that’s cool too.”

His last line in the play: “Africa is just da place where bad tings happen. Yes, tings dey happen.”

After “Tings” closed December 22, Hoyle performed another six-week run in San Francisco, where the show won the 2007 Will Glickman Award for Best New Play in the Bay Area. He was also nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award, which recognizes off-Broadway theatre, for Oustanding Solo Show and has toured colleges performing the play.

This summer Hoyle traveled across the country researching a show about small town/rural America. Theatergoers will soon see what he has uncovered—the things that happen there.