DANNY HOCH IS A HIP HOP IDEALIST
Along with being a playwright, an actor, and a director, Danny Hoch is a hip hop idealist. “I kinda feel about it [hip hop] the same way I feel about the Cuban revolution,” he explains in a New York-tinged deep voice that would startle anyone familiar with his brief role as whiteboy fashion designer send-up Timmy Hillnigger in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. “I believe in its ideals and I believe in what it sort of set out to do at the beginning but I feel that a lot of it is still holding on to pages of its own book that are early in the book. If it’s gonna have any success it needs to keep turning pages.”
Hearing this adds a new level of understanding to his new play, Till the Break of Dawn (playing through Oct. 21st at the Abrons Art Center in Manhattan). On the surface, Till the Break of Dawn is the story of six activists from different walks of life who go to Cuba for an international hip hop conference and meet up with a fugitive former Panther; but looking even deeper, Till the Break of Dawn is a complex analysis of the issues facing activists today. “As an artist and an activist myself,” he says “I had done a fair amount of organizing with friends of mine from the 90s moving into this decade, and there was a lot of dissatisfaction and contradiction coming up that I felt were all at once powerful, indescribable, and worth addressing.”
Hoch addresses these issues insightfully, presenting his characters with an enthusiasm that is as genuine as it proves to be naïve. As these characters find themselves struggling to navigate their way through a Cuba that fails to live up to their utopian expectations, they seem to find that their entire notion of activism and revolution is flawed. Or is it? While the “dissatisfaction and contradiction” within the characters revolutionary inclinations provide a difficult foil for their initial plans, Hoch’s message is a positive one; eventually the group starts to turn pages and everything falls into place.