Dan Hoyle Returns to the Marsh with THE REAL AMERICANS

Returning with newly-added post-election material, The Marsh San Francisco presents Dan Hoyle's wildly popular The Real Americans. In this acclaimed production, award-winning actor/playwright Hoyle gives a riveting recounting of his 100-day van trip through small-town and rural America, where he found himself at ground zero of the country's economic inequality and political division. The updated ending will bring heightened relevancy in 2017 as the 45th president, championed by Middle America, continues his first year in office. Director Charlie Varon's work in The Real Americans earned a 2016 Theatre Bay Area award for Outstanding Direction of a Play and SF Theater Blog hailed the revised production as "over the top brilliant, a belly-laugh evening of the best that solo performance has to offer." Including talkbacks with journalists, activists, authors, and policy experts, which have previously featured NPR's Al Letson, The Atlantic's Adam Werbach, and UC Hastings professor Joan C. Williams, The Real Americans plays from October 6-28, 2017 with performances 8:00pm Fridays, 5:00pm Saturdays at The Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco. For tickets ($25-$35 sliding scale, $55-$100 reserved), the public may visit www.themarsh.org or call 415-282-3055 between 1-4pm, Monday through Friday.

The Real Americans made its World Premiere at The Marsh San Francisco in 2010, and was held over for eighteen months. An instant hit with audiences and critics alike, the show received critical acclaim from major news outlets as it went on to perform across the country and around the globe. It won critical kudos from The New Yorker, which called Hoyle's performance "smart, entertaining, funny, insightful and surprising... [the show] is compassionate and ultimately hopeful, without being soft at all." It was also praised as "impressive, hilarious, moving and provocative... should be seen in and outside every liberal bubble in the country," by the San Francisco Chronicle. The New York Times celebrated his performance noting, "Hoyle channels just plain folks with compassion and respect."

After more than 300 performances across the country and post-election updates from the road in 2017, Dan Hoyle's The Real Americans returns to where it began. Through Hoyle's re-visited interactions with a Reaganite union coal miner in Appalachian Kentucky, a family oriented drug-dealer in the Mississippi Delta, an anti-war gun salesman in Michigan, a closeted gay creation theory expert in Texas, a group of hipster brunchistas in San Francisco, among others, audiences catch a glimpse of the intense polarization of culture and politics in the era of Donald Trump's presidency throughout the United States.

The Marsh has been home to Dan Hoyle's World Premiere shows Each and Every Thing (2014), The Real Americans (2010), Tings Dey Happen (2006), and Florida 2004: The Big Bummer (2004). These shows have received critical acclaim with The Huffington Post praising Hoyle's brand of journalistic theater for its "emotional depth and intellectual breadth." The 2014 World Premiere of Each and Every Thing won him a Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award, and it was dubbed "smartly constructed and highly entertaining" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2007, Tings Dey Happen was awarded the Will Glickman Award for Best Play with The New York Times calling it "funny and poignant." When discussing his work at The Marsh with East Bay Times, Hoyle proclaimed "The Marsh is to me the best place in the country to develop new work...there's nothing else like it."

Charlie Varon is an artist-in-residence at The Marsh in San Francisco, where he has been writing, performing, directing, and teaching for more than 20 years. As collaborator/director, Varon has worked with performer Dan Hoyle since 2004, on his solo shows Circumnavigator, Tings Dey Happen, Each and Every Thing, and The Real Americans. As playwright/performer, Varon's award-winning shows - all created in collaboration with David Ford - have enjoyed extended runs at The Marsh and traveled around the country. These include Rush Limbaugh in Night School, The People's Violin, Rabbi Sam, Feisty Old Jew, and most recently, his collaboration with Joan Jeanrenaud, Second Time Around.

The Marsh is known as "a breeding ground for new performance." It was launched in 1989 by Founder and Artistic Director Stephanie Weisman, and now annually hosts more than 600 performances of 175 shows across the company's two venues in San Francisco and Berkeley. A leading outlet for solo performers, The Marsh's specialty has been hailed by The San Francisco Chronicle as "solo performances that celebrate the power of storytelling at its simplest and purest." The East Bay Times named The Marsh one of Bay Area's best intimate theaters, calling it "one of the most thriving solo theaters in the nation. The live theatrical energy is simply irresistible."

Photo credit: Patrick Weishampel

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