Ignorance is us . . .

Playwright-performer Dan Hoyle has created a solo performance-piece, "The Real Americans," based on impressions of characters he encountered in a cross-country road trip through small town and rural America.  It sounds like a sort of present-day version of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town."

Out of this material, Hoyle embodies these ordinary Americans who speak in telling one-liners.  Although the lines selected for quoting in a New York Times review (March 19, 2014) portray a certain bias against uneducated, southern conservatives, the article also states that Hoyle "encountered plenty of kindness on the road," and that "he found undereducated white men furious at their own marginalization."

Here are a couple of choice lines -- whatever the bias of the reviewer picking these out, which of course resonates with my own bias:

"If somebody wants to be stupid, that's their right."

"Can't nobody take away a man's ignorance from him, can he?"

The reviewer also comments that the show is at it liveliest when Doyle takes on a few black voices, including one of the president delivering a pep talk to the playwright who is discouraged about the state of our country.

Hoyle's performance has a limited run at an off-Broadway theater in the Village.   Let's hope this isn't the end of his show.   Perhaps a national tour?

Ralph