Actor/writer/performance artist Danny Hoch has made it his personal mission to bring an unusual type of character to the live stage. This character usually shows up only in the margins of dramatic literature: he may be a criminal or a drug addict or physically or mentally damaged. He may be a white kid who wishes he were black, a crippled man who wants to join the Air Force, or a poor guy who figures that prison is better than the outside world because in prison he might get experimental drugs for his AIDS.
In his preface to the published edition of Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop, Hoch explains that for most people, the characters of Stoppard, Pinter and company are too unfamiliar to really matter, and that he made it his task to dramatize the people he grew up with in New York. “To put it Brooklyn style: Showboat and Sideshow ain’t don’t got nothin’ to do with my life. I had mad beef with this situation.”
Now actor Curtis Belz is bringing Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop to the Performing Arts Building at HCC Ybor, and it’s a powerful presentation. Playing nine different characters – one of them a woman – Belz skillfully puts the margins at the center, compelling us to find America in places where David Letterman fears to tread: rundown apartments, back alleys, holding cells and physical rehab wards. On a set furnished with little beyond some clothelines, Belz convinces us that he’s Gabriel, whose mother “smoked cocaine when she was pregnant. That’s why my face is a little distorted, and my speech is distorted too.” Or he’s Sam, a corrections officer who’s made to see a therapist because he overreacted and pummeled a prisoner.
For each character, Belz changes an item or two of clothing and alters his voice – not always sufficiently, however – and his carriage. As Victor, a victim of an unnecessary police shooting, he walks awkwardly with steel crutches, and as romantic Blanca (actually a figure from Hoch’s earlier work Some People) he rushes around the stage wearing oversize earrings and a flimsy blouse. The force of the show is cumulative: what Hoch is offering us here is an alternative America, one that’s sadder, more worrisome, more fraught with problems than Thornton Wilder ever dreamed. If the effect is at times depressing, it’s also somehow splendid to see usually invisible citizens given their moment in the sun. So besides being well-written and well-acted, Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop also scores as a successful act of moral indignation.
Some favorite moments: When “Blanca” tells a friend that she thought her boyfriend was going to give her an engagement ring, but it turned out he was only handing her a condom. Or when “Flip,” a white teenager, imagines that he’s a black rapper on the Tonight Show, and explains to Jay Leno that he has “ten bitches up in my hotel room. Fuck it, I got 473 bitches up in my hotel room. But, it’s all good.” In prison, “Andy” insists that he’s better off incarcerated than outside making $5.50 an hour at McDonald’s, and on TV, rap star “Emcee Enuff” compares the music that comes from the East Coast and the West Coast: “For instance, you go out to the West Coast, people live in houses, Dave. They got room, all spread out, they got space…In New York, we take the subway. We’re all squooshed up and mushed against each other…therefore our rhyme style is gonna be, you know, more squooshed too.”
Belz makes most of the characters distinct from one another, though from time to time his verbal delivery reminded me, strangely enough, of performance artist Eric Bogosian (and shouldn’t Bogosian also get credit for impersonating “marginal” characters?). Director Christopher Rutherford does a fine job of focusing our attention on one protean actor, and Matt Wetherington’s musical interludes and accompaniments are alternately piercing and enchanting.
The show is preceded by a performance by the VYB Dance Company, led by the talented DeMario Henry – offering breakdancing and salsa and a few other styles besides. But as good as the dancers are, it’s Belz that you’ll remember on your way back to your car: Belz standing in for a whole world that Danny Hoch wants to rescue from obscurity. Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop may be too disjointed to offer anything like catharsis, but it’s powerful and memorable nonetheless. And it’s resonant. As Blanca puts it: “You think I’m dirty? Who do you think I am? Do you even know who you are?”
A satisfied spectator, at the very least.
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 7, 2009.