What Americans really think in these troubled times

These may be confusing and difficult times in America, but I consider myself pretty lucky. Most weekends, I get to hang out with an extraordinary group of people from around the country and see things their way. These folks are complicated, wise, and funny—and they’ve all been through a lot. 

There is Sammy from rural Missouri via Chicago, a former teen gangbanger turned social worker, who helps troubled young men exit from hate groups. He learned in prison about “showing people empathy when they least deserve it,” after a therapist pulled him from the brink in solitary confinement. “A lot of folks mistake listening for conceding,” Sammy told me, “But when you stop listening, that’s conceding—’cause then there’s no pathway for them to walk out of the place they’re in.”

There is Braden, a twenty-something forestry worker from Colorado, who wanted to pry his blue-collar work buddies away from the lies of far-right talk radio. Political arguments and his efforts to blend in with a “big-ass truck and getting all dieseled out at the gym” didn’t work. What convinced them, he found, was just being his jokester self and enduring long work days with them: “I’m a Christian, a Socialist, a Zoomer with a Jesus Piece earring and a Zebra T-shirt on. They’re still like, ‘you’re a kook.’ But I’m a kook they trust.” 

There is Margaret, a septuagenarian South Carolinian who discovered her ancestors were some of the biggest slave-traders in Charleston’s history—and who decided that was worth publicizing to all of her genteel friends in town. Why? “Shame doesn’t do anything. But if we can’t talk about the past, we can’t move forward together.”

A couple of nights a week, I embody these people onstage, along with various others including election organizers, a trio of barbers, a troubled Iraq War vet, and a survivor of a mass shooting. They are the focus of my latest solo show of journalistic theater, “Takes All Kinds,” about the politics of persuasion and change. I recreate my time spent with them and depict their personal stories. It’s a privilege and a challenge. The experience of communing with an audience to draw inspiration from these subjects’ lives never ceases to feel powerful. 

I traveled the country in 2023 and 2024 for field research, or what I like to call “the journalism of hanging out.” I do a lot of audio recording and go well beyond interviewing. Once things get rolling, there are plenty of jokes and laughs as I spend time observing how subjects interact in different contexts. They take me to a retirement party for a co-worker, or to an Atlanta Braves game, or to an old neighborhood steeped with memories from their childhood. I also collect ambient sounds for the show: the chatter in the bar where I first met the gravelly voiced combat vet, the thumping bass and whine of razors inside the Las Vegas barbershop, a whooshing torrential downpour while on a house porch in Charleston.  

Now I find myself thinking about their collective story as the midterm elections approach. For me and theater audiences, these people show how complex and often contradictory Americans’ views really are—they don’t plug easily into partisan categories or poll numbers. Elevating their experiences onstage tends to leave audiences feeling “oddly hopeful,” as I often hear afterward.  

So many Americans these days are talking past each other. We burn up so much time on “social” media that mostly leaves us outraged and alone. We seem to consider less what might be behind the complicated views of others. When I went back recently to talk with the guys at the Vegas barbershop, Danny, the elder in the crew, told me that he disliked the ICE raids in LA and Minneapolis but also said that “being profiled for being brown, that’s nothing new, homie.” And he clapped back at the notion that it’s all on Trump. “I’m Latino, but I’m not an immigrant,” he said. “Shit, my people were chillin’ in New Mexico eating green chile way before y’all white people got here.”

In June, I’ll perform the show for the first time in Washington, DC—maybe an elected leader or two might even catch it—and in New York City and Sacramento. The director of the show, Aldo Billingslea, and I plan to keep taking it around the country. We’ve already had the joy of bringing the show back to some of the places and people whose stories it includes. In Charleston, I had the surreal and profound experience of embodying Polly Shepherd—a survivor of the racist gun massacre in 2015 at the Mother Emanuel AME Church—in front of her and her community. Seventy-nine years old and soft spoken, Polly had endured unspeakable horror and loss. Onstage together after the show, we did a talk-back with the audience. “A lot of people have tried to tell my story,” she remarked. “You got it right to a T. It was beautiful.” 

Collective witness is often understood in a religious sense, but it can also refer to making meaning out of trauma or pain. 

I loved getting to know these people, and now I get to honor that as a hundred or so strangers a night also have that experience. For me, this work models a way of listening and attending to each other. It’s more than just tolerating each other’s viewpoints. It’s about relishing eccentricities and celebrating connections. And it’s not downplaying the divides in a simplistic or kumbaya kind of way. The work of embodying these people onstage took two years of gathering their stories and honing in on the nuances of who they are.

So for about 75 minutes in the dark each night, audiences and I revel in their stories. It’s a shared experience of curiosity, joy, and uncertainty about what might be ahead. Or, as an election organizer named James says on an Atlanta street corner while hustling to register voters: “It’s not always pretty, but right now, bro, it takes all kinds.”

Dan Hoyle is an actor, playwright, and journalist based in Oakland, California. His solo show, “Takes All Kinds,” is touring nationally through fall 2026.