He’d Like to See You Squirm

He’s been called “Eric Bogosian’s younger brother”--a 26-year-old solo theatrical performer whose keen ear and sense of social outrage have landed him a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, off-Broadway’s Obie, an HBO special--and, by his estimate, $4 million worth of rejected film and TV offers.

Danny Hoch turned down a Quentin Tarantino movie. He nixed a role in “Money Train.” He refused to appear in an episode of “Seinfeld” because of perceived negative stereotypes--an incident recounted in his latest show, “Evolution of a Homeboy/Jails, Hospitals, and Hip Hop,” playing at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall next weekend prior to opening in New York in March.

“Money is about separation,” says the rubbery featured Brooklynite, sitting at a Westside hotel pool in an Adidas warm-up jacket, jeans and a fisherman’s hat with a New York Yankees logo. “I’m about community.”

And Hoch’s community, without question, is a far remove from Hollywood. His mission: to bring the ethnic fringe--what he calls society’s “day players . . . five lines or less”--center stage. Among them this time: a former crack baby bidding farewell to his longtime speech therapist; a Puerto Rican who has been shot by the police; a Vietnam vet who prefers prison to minimum wage at McDonald’s; and Hoch’s first non-New York character--a 17-year-old white gangsta-rapper wannabe from Montana.

“This show is about language,” says Hoch, digging into a plate of spaghetti marinara. “People whose native language isn’t English trying to communicate with each other in the context of violence, poverty, rejection, love. And it’s about changing the language of the theater from a literary, written tradition to the stuff I spew out--purely oral. In a multicultural society, thoughts and dreams can’t be expressed in standard English.”

“Homeboy,” the monologuist says, is darker, more confrontational, than “Some People”--Hoch’s highly acclaimed 1994 stage-show-turned-HBO-special that put him on the map.

“I’m interested in creating a ‘discomfort zone,’ ” Hoch says. “While I respect Anna Deavere Smith’s tremendous talent, it wasn’t cool to do a show about the L.A. uprisings [“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992”] and have everyone leave feeling good about themselves. People naturally want to be entertained, but in the end, theater is also an educational tool.”

Hoch’s path is a risky one, his colleagues agree. “Danny could easily be accused of being racist, mimicking ethnic stereotypes,” says Philip Bither, curator of performing arts at Minneapolis’ Walker Arts Center. “But his empathy for his characters shines through. His approach is less aggressive than Bogosian’s--there’s the notion of a shared humanity, the image of a ‘better place.’ ”

Mark Russell, artistic director of Performing Space 122--an East Village cultural center that became Hoch’s home base, has his own take on the artist: “I call Danny the Diane Arbus of solo performance,” he says. Like the photographer, “he brings out the characters in such great detail--without a lot of commentary.”

Hoch’s speech pathologist mother must be proud--and relieved. Hoch himself teetered close to the brink. A child of divorce reared Jewish in an ethnically diverse middle-class Queens housing project, he was locked up repeatedly for graffiti writing and minor drug dealing. (“I never did serious time because I was so young . . . and so white”). The money from drug sales supported his passions: equipment for a magic act and white-face makeup for mime. Marcel Marceau was a great influence, as were Shields and Yarnell. As a teen, Hoch would perform at parties and bar mitzvahs and do break-dancing in the street.

Hip-hop, which hit New York hard in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, basically saved his life, he says. “It’s a culture that came out of resistance--a kind of music, a style of dressing and talking, a way of viewing the world,” Hoch explains. “Hip-hop has made tons of mistakes in the form of violence and negative imagery. But for people born after 1970, it’s the most articulate means of release we have.”

At his mother’s insistence, Hoch applied to Manhattan’s prestigious High School of Performing Arts. There, he joined a six-man rap group in which he was the lead vocalist--and the only white. After graduation, he headed south to study acting at the North Carolina School of the Arts. That was followed by a yearlong stretch at London’s British American Drama Academy.

“I never witnessed white American culture until I went to college,” Hoch said. “ ‘Dynasty,’ ‘Dukes of Hazzard,’ ‘All My Children’ were alien to me. My inner monologue was always in Cuban Spanish.”

Hoch returned home and, for four years, was part of the Creative Arts Team--a New York University-affiliated educational theater group that teaches conflict resolution in alternative schools and jails. Writing and performing, however, were never far from his mind. In 1991, his first show, “Pot Melting,” opened at a downtrodden alternative performing arts space, and played again the following year. Comedy clubs were not an alternative: “There aren’t enough jokes to keep people amused over drinks,” he says.

Not until 1994’s Obie-winning “Some People” did people begin to take notice. The New York Times delivered a rave when the show opened at P.S. 122, and 200-plus calls came through the next day. Booked into Joseph Papp’s Public Theater for three weeks, it ended up playing three months. A year later, it played L.A.’s Taper, Too.

P.S. 122’s Russell is taking a gamble in March, booking “Homeboy” for three times the venue’s normal run--especially because the money for the production is not yet in place. Hoch is approaching hip-hop-friendly operations such as Def Jam, Interscope, Adidas and Nike, trying to raise the money on his own. He told previous investors who wanted to charge $35 a ticket to take their $300,000 back.

Hoch was besieged with offers after the airing of HBO’s “Some People,” which was nominated for a Cable Ace Award. But--despite the urging of the William Morris Agency--blowing up a token booth in “Money Train,” appearing in what he calls a “Mexican whore” scene in Tarantino’s “From Dusk Till Dawn,” or taking on a role in an Arnold Schwarzenegger Christmas film was never part of his game plan.

Turning down “Seinfeld” was more of a test. Receiving assurances that there was no ethnic dimension to the role he had been offered, Hoch hopped a plane headed west. He arrived to find himself playing Ramon, “a crazy pool cleaner” with a Spanish accent . . . and flew back home the next day. “I found myself trembling,” Hoch recalls. “All my values were hung up in front of me. People would kill to be in my shoes, so it was a soul-building experience to resist.”

Jo Bonney, Hoch’s longtime director, questions Hoch’s decision to include the “Seinfeld” vignette in his show. It’s the first time he has appeared on stage as himself. “Danny says people want to get beyond the characters--to see who he really is,” says Bonney, who also directs Bogosian, to whom she’s been married for 15 years. “But, for me, the word ‘self-congratulatory’ comes up. Who the real artist is is a self-indulgent question. What Danny really is is a storyteller, a raconteur.”

Hoch now lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn--a racially charged area populated primarily by a Satmar sect of Hasidic Jews and the Puerto Rican-Dominican community. Manhattan, he says, is too “American”--and Hollywood a “foreign country.” “L.A. may be the capital of communication, but people are petrified of human contact,” he says. “New York, at least, has the democracy of the subways.”

That’s not to say Hoch won’t rub elbows with the entertainment world--when the time feels right. Last summer, he wrote and starred in a critically acclaimed segment of HBO’s “Subway Stories.” He’s also appearing as a tough New York soldier in Terence Malick’s upcoming “The Thin Red Line,” along with John Travolta, Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson.

Getting his message into the mass consciousness isn’t easy, says Hoch. His “White Boys” screenplay--a story dealing with white approbation of black culture--has drawn limited response. And a TV series on which he collaborated with Darnell Martin (“I Like It Like That”) was bought by ABC but never shot.

“It’s dangerous,” Hoch says of the series, which revolves around community centers in the Bronx and Brooklyn run by young people. “Whites aren’t at the center of the action. And there are no adults, saviors of ghetto kids, as Michelle Pfeiffer and Annie Potts were in ‘Dangerous Minds.’ ABC executives, I was told, had spent money on that show, which they termed ‘culturally specific.’ Doing more, they feared, would lose them their white audience.” (ABC declined to comment.)

The notion that whites would turn the channel is preposterous to Hoch. “Everyone,” he says, “is interested in finding out about the real other.”

*

“EVOLUTION OF A HOMEBOY / JAILS, HOSPITALS AND HIP HOP,” Schoenberg Hall, UCLA. Dates: Friday to next Sunday, 8 p.m. Tickets: $27. Phone: (310) 825-2101.