Offering up a host of wonderfully nuanced portraits, a veritable Whitmanesque catalog of American types, Hoyle is a master at slipping in and out of characters even as these characters engage in conversations with each other. Directed by Charlie Varon, Hoyle fully inhabits both physically and vocally the various personages he portrays, but he also allows us to see how he reacted to them—conveying a sense of Middle America that is often humorous but surprisingly full of compassion.

Hoyle does not romanticize what Sarah Palin dubbed the “real America.” Hoping to stop in old-style country cafes in which he could genially chat with rustic Midwestern and Southern folks over slices of apple pie, Hoyle is disappointed and abandons his aspirations to such nostalgic Americana. Instead, he presents struggling Americans who are full of both anger and ignorance. While some of his portraits may at first look like stereotypical hillbillies and rednecks, Hoyle ultimately takes us more deeply into the hearts and souls of his characters. This is true even of a self-professed redneck from Alabama, a paralyzed wheelchair-bound invalid. According to his wife, this accident victim holds on to a redneck persona merely out of loyalty to family tradition. Underlying Hoyle’s presentation of the lilting deferential Southern dialect and physically genteel demeanor of this wife is a woman with insightful perceptions. Even more telling here is how Hoyle captures the details of how her wheelchair-bound husband carefully manipulates his unfeeling legs while maintaining a proudly erect sitting posture.

Hoyle, in his own voice, may explicitly call attention to the superstitious ignorance of the back-country characters, but ignorant narrow-mindedness is not limited to the denizens of the heartland states. Hoyle has some fun in presenting his San Francisco friends. With their PC, “green,” and new-age ideals as well as their smartphone-mediated consciousness of the world, they seem content behind the walls of their smugly proclaimed elitism and are no less insular than their rural cousins.

While the Middle America characters may frequently confess to anger and a sense of betrayal, these feelings are often counterbalanced by a well-meaning good-heartedness. Hoyle embodies the various members of a Texas fundamentalist family, which accepts Dan into their circle with open arms. Even as Hoyle portrays the stiff-backed, gravelly voiced family patriarch, he shows us a man with a sense of humor and a real devotion to family, God and nation. And again, underlying his presentation of a low-voiced, gingerly-moving and apparently reserved elderly Michigan gun show trader is an emotionally engaged individual. Angry at the senselessness of the wars he’s seen, this character with his chin lowered on to his chest as if to avoid eye contact still maintains his faith in America.

Perhaps the angriest character of the bunch is Ramon, a New Yorker of Dominican descent. Speaking with a heavy Spanish accent, Hoyle reveals a character who has fought for the country in Iraq expressing disdain for the rural America characters who see him as different, as not having blended in as other immigrants did in the past century. But even as he gives voice to his uniqueness and that of others like him from contemporary New York, his energetic gestures and passionate speech don’t entirely mask a sensitivity to the perceived loss that those who seem to harass him suffer.

Not only does Hoyle people the world of his play with a well-drawn and well-presented range of characters, but he intersperses the character vignettes and occasional impersonations (his Obama is OK, but as he admits through one of his characters his Bill Cosby is more fun than accurate) with songs that help to explicate the play’s structure. Early on Hoyle uses a humorously developed rap piece complete with appropriate dance movements to launch his journey into the heartland, and later he takes up a guitar to offer a song that pulls the various character sketches together.

Hoyle is unquestionably a man of many talents. A careful observer of character vocal and physical rhythms, of dialectal and gestural markers, he gives us a picture of the real Americans he encountered, and while he may not have finally discovered the sources of the increased polarization that we have all experienced, he does close his piece with a well-earned, if somewhat vague, assertion of hope for America’s future—and this too is something we can all appreciate.

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It is a piece that could easily tip into stereotypical generalizations, but Hoyle delivers characters, not caricatures. With the change of a hat, Hoyle slips into the skin of each new American; he is a master of dialects, inflection, physicality, and swagger. He introduces us to a self-proclaimed “crippled old racist redneck,” a Dominican American from NYC who fought in Afghanistan, an ex-hippie who gave up Haight-Ashbury for conspiracy theories, and an Appalachian mechanic whose speech requires subtitles.

Not that the play insists “the real America” even exists. Hoyle needs a pep talk from a moonshine-induced vision of Obama to get through it. By that point, everyone needs it, because what do you do when the same people who feed you, clothe you, and pray for your safe journey, also insist that the Rapture is imminent and Obama is a Muslim? As the Appalachian hillbilly says, “If you find America, you tell me. I don’t see it much.”

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Hoyle, a journalist, playwright and performer, turned his experiences from the trip into an acclaimed, new one-man show, The Real Americans. Compared to the likes of Lily Tomlin and John Leguizamo in his talent for impersonation, Hoyle tells the stories of the people he met in their own words, voices and mannerisms, and creates composite characters to represent them—many of which would be offensive if they weren’t so hilariously dead-on. There’s the crippled racist in Alabama who reckons that terrorists don’t mess with the South because they must have seen Cops and know that “rednecks don’t go down easy,” and the evangelist grandfather in Texas who explains that giraffes are proof of creationism because they don’t get dizzy when they raise their heads.

Hoyle mocks the “latte liberals” to equally hilarious effect. He imitates his friend Emily, exclaiming, “I’m so over all of it. I’m such a hipster bitch, I’m even over myself.” But whether ranting about how Obama is a Muslim, lamenting the lack of work to be found or praying for their grandchildren shipping out to Afghanistan, each of Hoyle’s characters come off as both real and surprisingly sympathetic.

“I think the challenge we find ourselves in as a country, and what I try to show in the play, is that we shouldn’t view people as our enemies—they’re our brothers and sisters,” Hoyle says. “It’s really easy I think for people in the liberal bubbles to either write these people off completely or have a sort of rose-colored view of ‘Can’t we just get along?’ And I think neither one is correct. You have to acknowledge the differences.”

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