Dan Hoyle Returns to The Marsh With BORDER PEOPLE

Award-winning actor and playwright Dan Hoyle returns to The Marsh San Francisco with his critically acclaimed hit Border People. Based on Hoyle’s conversations and interviews from the South Bronx housing projects courtyards, refugee safe houses on the Northern Border with Canada, and travels along the Southwestern Border and into Mexico it features 11 monologues of people who live on or across borders both geographic and cultural. Hoyle’s work is an intimate, raw, poignant, funny look at the borders that many negotiate in their everyday lives. Border People has been greeted with unanimous critical acclaim, earning the highest rating from the San Francisco Chronicle, which highlighted, “this is what it is to witness a master of his craft. Dan Hoyle is one of our theatrical gems,” and praised the production as “a testament to the core-to-nerve ending commitment and courage” of those living on borders of any kind. 

Border People, developed with and directed by Charlie Varon, runs October 7 – November 18, 2023 with performances at 7:00pm Fridays and 5:00pm Saturdays at The Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco. For tickets ($25-$35 sliding scale, $50 and $100 reserved) or more information, the public may visit themarsh.org.

Hoyle began work on the show after the election of Trump in November 2016, working with increased urgency to complete the work as the American immigration debate continued to grow more heated. Border People is based on Hoyle’s conversations and interviews along the Southwestern border and into Mexico, as well as at refugee safe houses on the Northern border with Canada, and in the courtyards of housing projects in the South Bronx. It offers a startling gallery of portraits of those, in Hoyle’s words, “who cross borders, geographical or cultural, by necessity or choice.” Border People continues Hoyle’s brand of journalistic theater that has been hailed as “riveting, funny and poignant” by The New York Times and “hilarious, moving and very necessary” by Salon.

Border People was welcomed by critics, who called it, “Enthralling. Deeply moving. Sometimes heartbreaking, more often funny” (San Francisco Examiner) and “visionary. Seventy-five spellbinding minutes.” (BroadwayWorld). In October 2019, Border People headlined the world’s premier storytelling event—the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. After its closing run at The Marsh San Francisco, Border People made its Off-Broadway premiere at the Gural Theatre at the A.R.T./New York Theatres, where The New York Times applauded Hoyle for his “empathy and cultural border crossing.” OnStage Blog called it “an exhilarating, linguistic rollercoaster,” adding that “Hoyle expertly paints strokes of the difficult, different realities of unique individuals wanting to be heard.”

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