Some People
However, unlike Anna Deavere Smith, who appeared at the Goodman Studio Theatre not long ago, Hoch’s personal viewpoint is everywhere–a great artistic pity. At the end of Some People, barely 20 seconds after the applause has begun, he gestures to his audience for silence and performs a little acoustic rap, using a wooden stage prop as a bongo. He informs us that (a) this show is about “we” and “they,” (b) it “ain’t no performance art” but an evening of theater, and (c) he is “young, single, and free.” Had the rest of the show not been performed with such skill, this little finale might easily have undermined his entire effort.
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If Hoch has done his job as an artist, we’ll figure out that the show is about “we” and “they.” And the only people who care whether a piece is performance art or theater are editors and writers; performance, speech, and theater departments at universities; and grant committees. An audience doesn’t care how an artist wants to categorize or market himself. As for his being “young, single, and free,” I thought to myself: “Who else would end with a ‘come and get it’ statement like that but a performance artist?” I suppose when you’re 24 you can make bizarre statements and get away with it, at least with your contemporaries.
His most courageous portrayal is of a Jewish mother, Doris, who harbors a barely contained, barely recognized racism. She scraps alternately with her son and her husband and carps about her son’s lack of health insurance and the “sort of Peace Corps in New York” work he does. She almost begs him to come to seder. She tells him she’s worried about him because she reads the New York Times, and she knows what goes on in certain neighborhoods in New York: “They kill their own…” she begins and stops. Hoch brings his portrait to life with a sweater and a phone, an impeccable Long Island accent, and the perfect posture, his character slouched into the phone as if for sustenance. When she asks the son if he’s angry with her, there’s a pause and then she says, “Well, I’m your mother…” And we know she’s saying, “Who else should you be mad at but your mother?” Here the push and pull of a mother’s relationship with her son, the juxtaposition of Doris’s idealism with her deficiencies of character, and the conflicts with her son are conveyed subtly and lovingly.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Paula Court.
