Danny Hoch Makes a Name by Doing Well With ‘Others’

Pardon Danny Hoch his cynicism, but it’s a little tough for him to get excited about Hollywood when agents and executives who tell him how great he is know of him solely from press clippings.

“When I started getting big,” recalled the 24-year-old New York theater performer (he rejects being called a “performance artist” or “monologuist”), “agents started calling from L.A., who hadn’t even seen the show but had read about it, offering me jobs. It was insane. I was offered everything in the world from commercials to sitcoms to movies. They’d say, ‘We have this script for you, you’re like this cool bike messenger.’ You don’t know how many times I’ve heard, ‘We’re looking for this cool, young, hip, street guy.’ I could recycle a whole tree with the movie scripts they gave me.”

Hoch brings “Some People,” the acclaimed one-man show from the East Coast that caused the avalanche of West Coast interest to the Taper, Too, beginning on Thursday.

“Some People” portrays, in a seriocomic fashion, a series of characters, from homeboys both giddy and glum to a fastidious Polish handyman to a Jewish matron whose politically correct liberalism masks some ridiculous prejudices to a Puerto Rican father lamenting the violence of the streets. Hoch nails each accent perfectly, but his performance is hardly a gimmick--he uses his multicultural canvas to create a show about how both vital and perilous communication between people--of any background--can be.

Hoch grew up in a melting-pot neighborhood in the Bronx, which gave him the opportunity to observe various cultures and learn myriad accents. “I had a very rare perspective on America,” he said during an interview in, of all places, Aspen, where he performed at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. “I thought it was just a perspective on New York, but as I’ve taken it around the country, I’ve found it translates, it’s universal. I’m very fortunate to have this rare take on things.”

His unique understanding of and appeal to audiences of other cultural backgrounds has gotten him pegged as young and hip, an appellation Hoch rejects. “That is what these packagers of entertainment are seeing me as because they see this white guy who, quote, speaks the language of the other,” he said. “They’re so eager to communicate with ‘the other’ and here is this person who is supposedly one of them, because I’m white, and I have this in, so I’m the hot thing.”

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Eventually, Hoch said he told the gaggle of executives, “ ‘I’m not adverse to film, I’m not adverse to TV, but with all this (garbage) you’re passing on to me, maybe it is better that I tell you that I do not want to do any film or TV.’ So now they sift through these scripts, and now maybe I get one a month, but two years later, I still haven’t seen anything good.”

The one concession the actor has made to the industry is to allow HBO to broadcast a version of “Some People,” which he is currently taping before coming to Los Angeles.

“They’re thinking I did this one-man show so I could be discovered and go be a movie star, but actually, I’m doing the HBO special so people will come see my next theater show,” Hoch explained. “Theater for me is absolutely more important. It’s a live experience, it’s an active experience.”

To that end, Hoch teaches conflict resolution through drama with a troupe of actors to inmates at New York prisons. “It’s very volatile improvisation through short scenes based on different scenes,” he said; the scenario topics include AIDS, abuse, prejudice and racism, even employment skills. “We get the inmates and students to act with us to change the consequences of the characters we’re portraying. We don’t tell them anything, so if they say, ‘Yo, I think your character should bust that (expletive) in the head with 10 bullets,’ we don’t say, ‘No, that’s wrong,’ we say, ‘OK, let’s do it,’ and play out the consequences of what that is.

“It’s amazing, when you walk into a room full of inmates, you get the feeling that not only do they know everything, but you shouldn’t even say anything to them. And after 30 seconds of theater, they’re on the edge of their seats. You cannot replace that with anything. There’s nothing like the power of theater and the thinking it causes and the soul-searching it provokes, especially in a jail situation. From my experience, it is the most important theater I have done, by far more important than what I’m doing now.”

In fact, the State Department is sending members of Hoch’s company to Israel, where they will instruct Palestinian, Israeli, Jordanian and Syrian actors in their methods, who will in turn return to their respective countries and travel to schools performing pieces about cultural differences.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: Hoch recalled one costly decision.

“I got offered these Sprite commercials, it was a million-dollar deal,” he said. He turned it down.

Taking such a stand resulted in months of heated debate with his friends. “They said, ‘Are you crazy? If you have a million dollars, you can buy your own jail! You can put up 10 solo shows and everyone’ll come see it.’ But that’s not necessarily true.

“Because if you’re the Sprite Boy, you don’t do workshops in jails--they won’t even let you in jails--and if you’re the Sprite Boy, a certain audience will come to see your shows, and that’s not the audience I want,” he says, adding with firm resolve, “I didn’t come this far to become the Sprite Boy. I’m not doing this for money. In two years, who knows, I could be Sprite Boy, Coke Boy, RC Cola Boy. But right now, I’m still young and idealistic. I want to get paid for what I do. But theater is about community, and money is about the antithesis of community, it’s about separation.”

* “Some People” opens Thursday at the Taper, Too, John Anson Ford Theatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood Hills. Tickets $20. (213) 972-7392.