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 (above: photo by James Lennon) 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.
This article appears in Dec 2-8, 2000.