Voices Festival Productions Brings Dan Hoyle's Award-Winning Takes All Kinds to Washington
Voices Festival Productions will present acclaimed journalistic theater pioneer Dan Hoyle's Takes All Kinds for the final leg of his 2026 tour, following sold-out runs at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater in NYC, The Marsh in San Francisco, and enthusiastic responses in Chicago, Atlanta, and Charleston, along with a splashy summer profile in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section. Winner of the 2025 San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle (SFBATCC) Award for Best Solo Performance, Takes All Kinds captures the heart-wrenching, funny, and complex stories of people navigating the present, offering tender and inspiring portraits of everyday Americans turned unlikely changemakers.
Directed by Aldo Billingslea and developed with Charlie Varon and Michael Moran, Hoyle's critically acclaimed work will wrap up VFP's three-play "Voices From a Changing Nation" series with an eight-performance run, November 13-22, 2026, at Spooky Action Theater in the Universalist National Memorial Church (UNMC), 1810 16th Street, NW, Washington, DC - VFP's base of operations for the remainder of its 2026/27 season.
Takes All Kinds debuted at The Marsh in 2024, where it received critical raves and has since toured across America, playing to packed houses. In this 70-minute work, Hoyle recreates real conversations with a wide array of Americans he met on the front lines of today's political tensions - including a formerly conservative preacher's son who finds purpose in Florida school-board activism after his daughter comes out; Atlanta voting rights canvassers who reignite civic hope with family stories from the Jim Crow era; a former gang membe-turned-social worker who undertakes deradicalizing violent extremists, and many more.
"My goal has always been to remind Americans of their humanity," remarks Dan Hoyle, the creator of a passel of bracing solo shows, including The Real Americans, which played DC for eight weeks at Mosaic Theatre Company back in 2017 in the wake of another momentous national election. Huffington Post praised The Real Americans as "nothing short of brilliant: unsettling, poignant, and hilarious" and The Washington Post's Nelson Pressley remarked, "Just what you want to hear: all-over-the- map voices making sense of what seems to be the country's spinning compass... As a witty performer, he's fearless."
Dan Hoyle's brand of journalistic theater has been hailed as "riveting, funny and poignant" by The New York Times, with Takes All Kinds receiving praise from audiences and critics alike, including the San Francisco Chronicle, which gave the show its highest rating, calling it "something almost supernatural" that "ignites your imagination." Dubbed "sublime" by SFGATE, and a "genius celebration of America on the brink... moving and timely" by Theatrius, Takes All Kinds cements Hoyle as a defining voice in American solo theater. On tour, the acclaim has followed, with Charleston City Paper writing that "Hoyle mined the heart and humor of each American he interviewed, offering invaluable insight to our current national convergence." New York Notebook praised Hoyle's performance, saying he is "An extraordinary monologist, able to convey empathy and political outrage simultaneously via a gallery of spot-on portraits."