Last Thursday we took a field trip to the Playwright’s Center to watch Danny Hoch’s one man show “Taking Over.”
Hoch touched on the gentrification of his neighborhood, Williamsburg, in New York City. He did this through a series of raw, comical, and very well-acted over the top characters experiencing this event from a multitude of different perspectives.
Opening with a slighty-drunk neighborhood meeting, Hoch played a disgruntled boricua who’s family and friends were being pushed out of their homes due to the rising rents or their inability to renew their leases. He yelled at the imaginary meeting, spewing out the types of slurs and slang undertoned with hurt and confusion. “How come as soon as we get our own neighborhood clean it’s not good enough for us anymore.”
He went on to play a French real estate agent, selling to the super rich a deluxe condo in the sky. It’s worth noting that Hoch was impeccable in his voice acting of these different characters, nailing the language and subtle mannerisms for each. In one of his next scenes he played a Dominican cab dispatcher, speaking spanish to the drivers, and as he talked to driver’s of different Hispanic backgrounds (Puerto Rican, Mexican, Dominican), his accent would change to mock these driver’s and tell them, “Si puedes manejar y tampoco sabes donde estas, regresa a tu pinche colonia en Puebla guey.” I happen to be from Puebla.
Hoch played about seven or eight characters. They each portrayed a different viewpoint, from the NYU hipster selling cd’s on the street complaining about the police telling her to leave as “police brutality,” to the real estate developer who asked the question of why he wasn’t being rewarded for pushing “all the bad people” out of the neightborhood.
One of the better pieces in his performance was when Hoch took off the disguise of the character and read candidly from his own experience, recalling standing in what is now a Whole Foods, where back in 1984 in the same spot he stood he witnessed a murder. He spoke of traveling to perform because only people outside of his home want to listen to his story, and how it frustrates him that other people come to his home and change where he grew up.
There is no moral to the story, rather a gray area that leaves you thinking when you leave the auditorium. He showed the contempt and hate involved in class struggle. He showed how events like gentrification bring out the dark sides of people, eager to point out what’s wrong with everybody else. He did these in a great screenplay, summing up major themes of class struggle with comments from the opening Puerto-Rican speaker asking his grocery store owner “Why wouldn’t you buy soy milk when we would ask for it!? Why did you wait till the white people came!?”
Hoch shows that it is hard to find a right answer; he is part of the problem as well as part of the solution. He opens the dialogue for others to discuss these issues, and he shuts others out by embarrassing them or infuriating them.
“Taking Over” is a great one man show, because whether you agree or disagree with his feelings or his extreme character expressions, by the time he walks off the stage it will leave you with something to think about.
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