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Friday January 18, 2008

Jewish chameleon back on Berkeley stage

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

I’d like to introduce you to a Polish-Puerto Rican grad student. And an elderly black woman sitting on a stoop. And a convicted felon with no job and no future. And a Jewish developer with an eye on their homes.

Or, I could save the time and just introduce you to Danny Hoch. He’s all of them, after all.

Hoch, 37, was raised by his single mother in the LeFrak City housing development in Queens, where Jews are one of many minorities among blacks, Latinos and others. It was not a typical Jewish childhood — as he reminisced in a 1990s article, “I was a rapper, break-dancer, graffiti artist and drug dealer by the time of my bar mitzvah.”

Multitasking, it seems, has always come naturally to Hoch. He is currently starring in “Taking Over” at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, his first solo show in more than a decade. Hoch is also the founder of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, which he started in 2000.

While the play documents various lives in Hoch’s rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, it’s a theme that is playing out in West Oakland, San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood and hundreds of cities across the nation.

Although Hoch’s previous solo shows (“Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop” and “Some People”) took years to write, he notes that with a laugh he penned “Taking Over” in four manic days.

“I need to qualify that by saying I had been thinking about this for 10 years. And I had been thinking so hard and avoiding a [solo] show — they’re a lot of work. They’re exhausting and lonely,” said Hoch in a phone interview from Berkeley Rep between dress rehearsals.

“I had really wanted to work with other people in ensemble pieces and work in groups — ‘works well in groups,’ you know?”

In “Taking Over,” he’s back to working in groups alone. He leads the audience on a tour of his neighborhood through the eyes of a student whose family has been priced out of their apartment, a French real estate agent hosting an open

house at a new luxury condo, a clueless hipster girl and a black grandma perplexed as to what, exactly, a Volvo is doing parked on her block.

Hoch, who aspires to be the latest in a long line of Jewish storytellers “who can make you laugh and cry at the same time,” had some qualms about making the only overtly Jewish character in his play the real estate developer with designs on sweeping the minorities out of Williamsburg. But he hopes audiences will appreciate the Jewish character’s depth — along with the complexities of gentrification.

“He’s a funny character and very, very likeable. And as villainous as some of the stuff he says is, he actually says some of the deepest truths of the show,” explained Hoch.

For example, it’s the Jewish developer who notes the irony in having artists protest his projects. “They’re protesting me and my developments, but the reality is they’re fantasizing that they have something in common with poor people,” the character says. “They have nothing in common. They’re rich, college-educated American kids, and the others are poor people whose countries are being raped by our retirement funds. That’s why they’re cleaning the bathrooms in gourmet bagel stores and you’re not.”

Danny Hoch will perform the world premiere of his one-man show “Taking Over” at the Berkeley Repertory Theater until Feb. 10. Tickets: $27-$61 (those under 30 can get half-off). Information: www.berkeleyrep.org or (510) 647-2949.

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