September 9–16, 1999

fringe

Who Are We?

"Ninety-nine percent of Americans are not indigenous," says actor/writer/ chameleon Danny Hoch from his home in Brooklyn. "Jews are going to eat jerk chicken. Blacks are going to eat bagels. That’s what we’re doing socially — we’re eating each other’s ideas."

Hoch has been noshing on New York’s multiethnic stew ever since he was a kid growing up in Queens. White and Jewish, he rapped and tagged and got into trouble with kids who were black, Latino and Asian, all sharing one common denominator: hip-hop.

"Hip-hop became a language that ultimately crossed barriers."

Now he’s using that language to bridge barriers in theater, too. After working in prisons and schools with NYC’s Creative Arts Team, he realized that the voices he knew — the lifers, the kids — weren’t represented anywhere on Broadway. A big musical like Showboat is about "riverboats and Mississippi," he points out, "and the audience is from Mississippi, too. But where are the New Yorkers? What about my generation behind bars, my generation becoming hip-hop millionaires in a year?"

Hoch developed an extraordinary knack for writing and embodying a wildly divergent range of streetwise New Yorkers, from a combative Jewish mother to a Jamaican DJ. He showcased that skill in his smash one-man show Some People (which won an Obie Award and became a ’96 HBO special), and this week he brings his latest, Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop, to the Philly Fringe.

In addition to such new creations as a flirtatious Puerto Rican with a spinal injury and Flip Dog, a white Montana teen who’s a gangsta rapper wannabe, Hoch adds a new voice to the gallery: his own.

The success of Some People piqued Hollywood’s interest in Hoch. He was one of the hot young actors cut out of Terence Malick’s Thin Red Line, and this fall he stars in Whiteboys, a film based on the Flip Dog vignette.

But his most notorious run-in with Hollywood — the story he tells in Jails — occurred when he was tapped to play a Latino pool boy in Seinfeld. He refused to play according to stereotype — and lost the role.

"I didn’t have a problem playing a one-dimensional character," says Hoch. "But I did have a problem playing a one-dimensional Hispanic character."

The Seinfeld story addresses questions of identity and representation that come up in all his work.

"As an actor, in the ancient sense, I’m supposed to reflect my community," he replies. "If I’m not listening, what the fuck am I doing?"

—David Warner

Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop, co-presented by the Painted Bride and Phila.Theatre Co. at the Bride, 230 Vine St., Sept. 15-18, 8 p.m.