Ironic Dispatches From the Hip-Hop Nation

“I know I ain’t black to you, but I can take your culture, supe it up and sell it back to you,” announces Danny Hoch in the prologue to his comedic and powerful one-man play, “Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop.”

This opening poem is only a taste of the irony to come. With the quick change of only a few props, this 27-year-old New Yorker and self-proclaimed “urban griot” moves from one monologue to the next, artfully shifting between languages and linguistic styles.

In one scene, he is MC Enuff, a hard-core gangsta rapper sporting gold teeth and Versace clothing. In another, he is a prepubescent from Montana who idolizes Tupac Shakur. He plays an ex-con with AIDS and a Puerto Rican who, despite a spinal-cord injury resulting from a police shooting, wants to join the Air Force.

Hoch plays himself in only one sequence, where he recounts his real-life experience being cast as a pool man in an episode of “Seinfeld.” When Jerry Seinfeld and his producers insist that Hoch play the role with a Spanish accent, he’s unwilling.

“Accents aren’t funny--people are,” Hoch says.

The part was recast.

Hoch, who won an Obie for his 1994 play, “Some People,” says the characters he plays are friends he grew up with in Queens, N.Y., where racially, culturally and linguistically, there was no minority or majority.

“The only culture that prevailed was hip-hop,” says Hoch. “I want to bring these people center stage, with all their complexities.”

Therein lies the beauty of this show: Hoch gets us to simultaneously laugh and sympathize with his characters. But Hoch’s incarnations also illustrate the contradictions inherent in hip-hop today--a culture that has permeated mainstream America and that is used to peddle everything from soft drinks to liberation.

“Only in America,” laments Hoch, “can you sell CDs by claiming to be the roughest drug dealer or murderer this country has seen. Debasing yourself to usurp your own oppression--now that’s a contradiction!”

“Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop” plays through Sunday at the Actors’ Gang Theater, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood. (213) 465-0566.