Voices Competition Productions will current acclaimed journalistic theater pioneer Dan Hoyle’s Takes All Varieties for the ultimate 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, together with a splashy summer season profile in The New Yorker’s “Speak of the City” part. Winner of the 2025 San Francisco Bay Space Theatre Critics Circle (SFBATCC) Award for Finest Solo Efficiency, Takes All Varieties captures the heart-wrenching, humorous, and sophisticated tales of individuals navigating the current, providing tender and galvanizing portraits of on a regular basis Individuals 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 Altering Nation” collection with an eight-performance run, November 13–22, 2026, at Spooky Motion Theater within the Universalist Nationwide Memorial Church (UNMC), 1810 sixteenth Road, NW, Washington, DC — VFP’s base of operations for the rest of its 2026/27 season. Tickets are $35. For a full efficiency schedule, go to voicesfestivalproductions.com.
Takes All Varieties debuted at The Marsh in 2024, the place it acquired important raves and has since toured throughout America, taking part in to packed homes. On this 70-minute work, Hoyle recreates actual conversations with a big selection of Individuals he met on the entrance strains of in the present day’s political tensions — together with a previously conservative preacher’s son who finds function in Florida school-board activism after his daughter comes out; Atlanta voting rights canvassers who reignite civic hope with household tales from the Jim Crow period; a former gang membe–turned–social employee who undertakes deradicalizing violent extremists, and lots of extra.
“My purpose has all the time been to remind Individuals of their humanity,” remarks Dan Hoyle, the creator of a passel of bracing solo reveals, together with The Actual Individuals, which performed DC for eight weeks at Mosaic Theatre Firm again in 2017 within the wake of one other momentous nationwide election. Huffington Put up praised The Actual Individuals as “nothing in need of sensible: unsettling, poignant, and hilarious” and The Washington Put up’s Nelson Pressley remarked, “Simply what you wish to hear: all-over-the- map voices making sense of what appears to be the nation’s spinning compass… As a witty performer, he’s fearless.”
Dan Hoyle’s model of journalistic theater has been hailed as “riveting, humorous and poignant” by The New York Instances, with Takes All Varieties receiving reward from audiences and critics alike, together with the San Francisco Chronicle, which gave the present its highest score, calling it “one thing nearly supernatural” that “ignites your creativeness.” Dubbed “chic” by SFGATE, and a “genius celebration of America on the brink… transferring and well timed” by Theatrius, Takes All Varieties cements Hoyle as a defining voice in American solo theater. On tour, the acclaim has adopted, with Charleston Metropolis Paper writing that “Hoyle mined the guts and humor of every American he interviewed, providing invaluable perception to our present nationwide convergence.” New York Pocket book praised Hoyle’s efficiency, saying he’s “A rare monologist, in a position to convey empathy and political outrage concurrently through a gallery of spot-on portraits.”
ABOUT THE CAST & CREATIVES
Dan Hoyle’s world premieres as author/performer embody Takes All Varieties (2024), Speak To Your Individuals (2022), Border Individuals (2019), Every and Each Factor (2014), The Actual Individuals (2010 & up to date in 2017), Tings Dey Occur (2007), and Florida 2004: The Huge Bummer (2004). These reveals have all been launched at The Marsh, and every has acquired important acclaim. Hoyle’s Border Individuals earned the very best score from the San Francisco Chronicle, praising the manufacturing as “a testomony to the core-to-nerve ending dedication and braveness” of these dwelling on borders of any type. The critically acclaimed Every and Each Factor was declared “neatly constructed and extremely entertaining” by the San Francisco Chronicle and a “poignant, humorous touch upon the digital age” by The Mercury Information. Tings Dey Occur was awarded the Will Glickman Award for Finest Play, whereas The New York Instances referred to as it “humorous and poignant.”
Aldo Billingslea (Director) is a professor of theater at Santa Clara College (SCU), the place he teaches programs in efficiency and efficiency research. Billingslea grew to become SCU’s inaugural affiliate provost for variety and inclusion and served because the vp of the 100 Black Males of Silicon Valley. He additionally serves on the advisory board of Gritty Metropolis Youth Repertory Theater and on the Board of Regents for Archbishop Mitty Excessive College. As an actor, Billingslea has appeared in productions of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Ma Rainey’s Black Backside, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Operating and Radio Golf; Eugene O’Neill’s The Bushy Ape and Anna Christie; Arthur Miller’s Demise of a Salesman; August Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Need and greater than two dozen totally different performs by William Shakespeare. Billingslea has labored within the San Francisco Bay Space on the American Conservatory Theater, Aurora Theatre Firm, California Shakespeare Theater, Slicing Ball Theatre, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, Magic Theatre, Marin Shakespeare Theatre, Marin Theatre, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, and Shakespeare Santa Cruz. He has additionally labored at Portland Heart Stage, Tacoma Actors Guild, Sacramento Theatre Firm, Theatre Three in Dallas, San Antonio’s Majestic Theatre, InterAct Theatre Firm in Philadelphia, San Diego’s Outdated Globe Theatre, and Shakespearean Festivals of California, Dallas, Marin, Oregon, and Utah.
ABOUT VFP’S “VOICES FROM A CHANGING NATION”
Voices Competition Productions opened its 2026/27 Season with Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie at Dupont Underground, kicking off a three-play “Voices From a Altering Nation” collection presenting a collective portrait of these battling within the trench warfare of American democracy. A 3-night workshop studying of Alaudin Ullah’s The Halal Brothers runs November 6–8, bringing a Bengali-Muslim household of New Individuals into focus within the mid Nineteen Sixties, whereas Takes All Varieties brings us totally up-to-date.
Notes VFP’s Founding Inventive Producing Associate Ari Roth in a latest publication: “Woody Guthrie didn’t write about America from a desk. He rode the boxcars. He stood in reduction strains. He sang the tales of migrant employees and mill fingers as a result of he had lived alongside them, and believed the one sincere solution to render a rustic was to exit and meet it. Eighty years later, Dan Hoyle does the identical factor with a pocket book and a stage. For Takes All Varieties, Hoyle roams and rambles to the locations the place our nation is actively arguing with itself. Then he brings these actual folks to the stage, rendering them in their very own phrases, creating revelatory portraits. Completely different instruments, similar calling. Guthrie did it with a guitar, Hoyle does it with reporting and his personal physique. Each of them chase the identical factor: the total, humorous, sophisticated humanity of those who information headlines flatten into a sort.”
Takes All Varieties performs November 13 to 22, 2026, introduced by Voices Competition Productions at Universalist Nationwide Memorial Church (the place Spooky Motion Theater performs), 1810 sixteenth Road, NW, Washington, DC. Buy tickets ($35, with under-30 tickets at $20) on-line.
Takes All Varieties
Written and carried out by Dan Hoyle
Directed by Aldo Billingslea
ABOUT VOICES FESTIVAL PRODUCTIONS
Voices Competition Productions is an impartial, DC-based manufacturing firm growing and producing new works for the stage that stimulate debate and discourse, introspection and consciousness, knowledgeable by revelation of our underlying humanity in all its coloration and complexity. Our work finds resonance between these dwelling with battle within the Center East and nearer to house, alongside the seams of our nation, and its very actual, and perceived, divides.
Two signature packages embody the guts of our mission: Voices From a Altering Nation and Voices From a Altering Center East. Collectively, they carry among the most compelling modern tales of id, democracy, belonging, resilience, and coexistence to audiences all through Washington.
VFP’s most distinctive programming is its long-running Voices From a Altering Center East Competition, which has been humanizing headlines whereas bringing the souls and struggles of these dwelling within the Center East — particularly Israel and Palestine — to life for the previous 26 years. Created in 2000 at Theater J by Ari Roth, and later transferring throughout city to inaugurate Mosaic Theater Firm in 2014, the pageant has introduced forth over three dozen full productions and lots of extra workshop shows.
