Few Hooks for Hoch’s Hip-Hop

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The New York Sun

Danny Hoch is hardly the first solo artist to aim high and fall short. The hip-hop theater pioneer’s “Till the Break of Dawn,” a diffuse survey of radical chic, falls into the same rut that has bedeviled Eric Bogosian (“subUrbia”), Eve Ensler (“Necessary Targets”), and so many other solo-based playwright-actors. As each of Mr. Hoch’s characters lift off into the jagged, profane, elbows-out monologues for which he has become justly known, the listener’s pleasure is tempered by the realization that these men and women will eventually need to take a breath and begin talking to — or rather at — one another.

Mr. Hoch’s best known work, the electric “Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop,” includes a vignette in Havana in which a Cuban engineering student named Peter harasses a visiting American with an encyclopedic knowledge of American hip-hop argot. “Till the Break of Dawn” forces the ethnic and class tensions percolating underneath Peter’s bouncy patter up to the surface. Havana is still the location, but now the cast includes hardcore rappers, exiled political firebrands, conflicted activists, and Jewish wannabes.

These characters will ultimately converge in Cuba for a hip-hop festival, but the play begins and ends with six of the Americans gathering in the Brooklyn apartment of Gibran (Jaymes Jorsling, who offers a winning blend of certainty and confusion), a dot-com entrepreneur agonizing over whether to take a corporate job. With the exception of Adam Bruckner (Matthew-Lee Erlbach), the aspiring rap mogul who sponsors the trip, none of Gibran’s coterie has any money. Mr. Hoch, who also directed, mines a few early laughs from the competitive bohemianism — call it onedownmanship — among the group: “Why don’t you stay over there in the stressed-out, ‘I don’t know my Puerto Rican identity’ area of the room with your white people’s shoes on and listen to some Jim Morrison?” taunts the motor-mouthed Hector (the irrepressible Flaco Navaja).

This blend of sobriety and mockery continues once they arrive in Havana in summer 2001, joined by the celebrated gangsta rapper Big Miff (Dominic Colon), whose material doesn’t quite jibe with the group’s politics. Through an odd conflation of circumstances, the group crosses paths with two Americans on the lam, a French rapper, and a Cuban hiphop buff who has soaked up every bit of Madison Avenue propaganda he can find. (The cheap laughs from the latter character’s mangled catchphrases — “Where is the beef?” and the like — are forced to begin with and go down from there.)

Mr. Hoch struggles to depict the disillusionment that the Americans face as their pieties about revolutions and uprisings butt up against reality. The radical economic disparity in Cuba contradicts any idea they had held of a Socialist paradise. Among the people they meet is the fugitive Dana Sundiata (Gwendolen Hardwick), a fictitious compatriot of the real life Assata Shakur, who was granted political asylum in Cuba after being convicted of killing a state trooper. Dana counsels Gibran and the others on integrity and self-reliance, but she also operates a black-market cigar business by skimming from the state-run factory.

More crucially, there’s that summer 2001 setting. Unlike so many examples of what I call “September 10 art” — pieces that, like recent novels by Claire Messud and Jay McInerney, juxtapose America’s insularity and naïveté prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with the anxieties waiting around the corner – “Till the Break of Dawn” turns the cataclysmic events into nearly as much of a surprise to the audience as it is to the characters. Mr. Hoch doesn’t shy away from the irony that entire swaths of the globe saw in 9/11 the seeds of the uprising for which Jibran and his pals had been clamoring. One fairly sympathetic American, juiced up on half-digested slogans and fully ingested marijuana, even responds with vague contentment at the news, a bold move on Mr. Hoch’s part.

Sadly, this willingness to explore his characters’ less predictable beliefs trickles away speech by speech as everyone has his or her say. Even when these monologues spotlight Mr. Hoch’s gift for slippery logic and rat-a-tat wordplay — Messrs. Erlbach and Colon offer two of the evening’s best — the cumulative effect is numbing. Structure is not, to put it gently, Mr. Hoch’s forte. Scenes sputter into life and fade just as quickly with little focus. The play has 10 scenes and 10 characters, and at least two of each could be removed without the slightest impact on the story.

Mr. Hoch has directed theater pieces by several of his hip-hop theater peers, including the similarly nimble Will Power (“Flow”). He must have seen his share of excess from the other side of the footlights, and an outside voice could undoubtedly have helped him shed his own narrative flab here. (More surprising, given his love of dense language, is his inability to surmount the Henry Street Settlement’s iffy acoustics.) But as even the most minor characters step forward for yet another aria of reconciliation or outrage or confusion, “Till the Break of Dawn” begins to feel less like the play’s title and more like its running time.

Until October 21 (466 Grand St. at Pitt Street, 212-352-3101).


The New York Sun

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