Playing Me Playing You

Dan Hoyle
Dan Hoyle
Aug 9, 2017 · 5 min read

It started off as a voice I’d drop into when telling stories to friends who knew Pratim. They’d laugh, and say, “Pratim! Love that guy!” It was not that I’d nailed him exactly as he is, but I had something of his essence, his casual, irreverent brilliance. He’s quite complex, and I hadn’t studied him like I do other folks. I hadn’t listened to recordings of him, or observed his physical carriage and body language in any serious way. Sometimes it’s just like that. Some characters take months to get, others pop out fully formed without doing much.

I met Pratim in 2001 when he showed up for the first meeting of The International Playaz, a theater group of international students I started at Northwestern University my senior year. Among the members in our group was an economics graduate student from Russia named Eugene and a Jewish Costa Rican undergrad name Adriana. (All roles were cast across type, Eugene played a sinister American capitalist; Adriana played a disgruntled guerrilla fighter in a fictional Middle Eastern country.)

Then there was Pratim, a physicist from Calcutta who leased a sleek Acura, loved Bears football, was renting a room from a octogenarian progressive philanthropist in Willamette with an indoor pool, felt no compunction about downing a pack of Twinkies while filling up for gas, still occasionally wore a Kurta, had killer loose-knee pop dance moves, sang ancient Bengali songs with stirring beauty, and was completely happy to take a drive through deserted downtown Chicago streets at 2am after a rainstorm, stop in a local donut shop, get a half dozen and eavesdrop on cop talk. We became fast friends.

When I graduated Northwestern that Spring, I stayed living in my Roger’s Park apartment in Chicago for the summer. I was marginally employed and Pratim was disillusioned with his lab work, so we hung out constantly. We’d do man on the street interviews with Pratim’s video camera, hang out on Pratt beach late at night with girls, Pratim strumming the most sincere and only affecting version of Hotel California I’ve ever heard, we became friends with the local hustlers on my block, uncovering a completely different Chicago. Then when I got a sorta-opportunity in San Francisco that was better than my other sorta opportunities in Chicago, I decided to go home. My Grandfather sold me his 1991 Plymouth Acclaim for $600, so I was set to drive back across the country. Pratim finagled getting time away from his lab to join me. We had a feeling it would be the peak of a year of close friendship.

We took country roads and spent an idyllic five days driving through the cornfields, over the mountains, and across the desert. We listened to Manu Chao and Marvin Gaye on repeat. We talked to Nebraskans in Victorian hotels that seemingly hadn’t had a customer in years. We tossed footballs on small town baseball diamonds, Pratim proving to be an extraordinary wide receiver. We bought copious amounts of mozzarella cheese. We blew the minds of patrons at a bar in Greeley, Colorado who couldn’t determine if Pratim was Muslim or not. We performed a skit we had written for a blissed out pair of backpackers on a trail in the Rocky Mountains. We got a ticket for speeding in Utah, a ticket for not paying for a campsite in Colorado, and I got called out on a gas station intercom to “stop shooting baskets on pump 8” at 3am trying to wake myself up before a drive through the Nevada desert. (We then both downed several Starbucks ice cappuccinos. Pratim passed out within five minutes anyway.) We created our own road trip memes and counter-memes, developed comedic routines and got to know each other’s idiosyncrasies the way one does when you spend every waking moment with someone for five days straight. At the end of the trip, we knew our friendship was just getting started.

Over the years Pratim visited me in San Francisco, this time with his wife Pallavi (who he had been wooing on our cross country trip from truck stop pay phones and emails on dial up internet kiosks). I visited them in Chicago with my wife Lyra.

Then while feeling stuck on the script for EACH AND EVERY THING, my most recent solo show about how we experience the world in the digital age, Pratim said, “Why don’t you go to India man? It’s like the internet in real life.” I ended up living in Calcutta, with his parents, in his childhood bedroom, for a month. I spent most of my time hanging out at Indian Coffeehouse, the 19th century intellectual bohemian temple of open-ended conversation. I mind-melded with a table of luminous eccentrics who welcomed me with open arms. I had a particular connection to a guy who went by the nickname Totem, and bore a striking resemblance to Pratim.

But never in these twelve years of friendship did I think of making Pratim a character in a play. Then one day, while writing a scene about how I got started doing what I do, I wrote a scene from Chicago when I’d just graduated college that included Pratim. I read it the next day for Charlie, my director, and we knew we had found the star of the show.

Once it was established that Pratim was going to be a character in my next play, we understood that the time we spent together was all possible material. I would audio record some of our conversations, or scribble down notes. When he’d say something particularly funny or meaningful, he’d give a half smile and say, “You can use that too.”

At some point, as with all my characters, once I feel I have them down, I write in their voice. Though no events are invented, the play is not a verbatim retelling. But so many of the best lines are Pratim’s, and are observations he made over the past fifteen years. The character of Dan usually functions as the straight man. When I told him this, he said, “Yeah, but they are your lines too, because they only happen in the space when we get together. They are words that either one of us could have said. The character you are writing is our friendship.”

At the end of one of his trips to California, we stood by his rental car and talked about how he feels about being played by me onstage. He said at first it was strange to know that “my best friend is becoming me.” But then when he thought about it more he said, “I realized you’ve been doing a decades long research on me. Seeing the world through my eyes. And I knew it was going to be ok. Because there’s actually been a part of me inside you all along. That’s the point of connection, right? It’s so much better when you find yourself in other people than when you just find yourself.”

A year later, I performed the show for the first preview at The Marsh Theater in San Francisco, with Pratim in the audience. I could hear him laugh, which was comforting. But better yet, we got to share in the experience of presenting our friendship to a roomful of people. I got to jump back and forth between Pratim and Dan, playing two completely distinct characters who were parts of myself, a couple of the multiplicities we all hold inside us everyday. The joy was not just in knowing Pratim recognized himself in my portrayal of him, but that he saw that piece of himself in my portrayal of me.

Dan Hoyle

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Dan Hoyle

Actor, playwright, journalist, sports fan, politico.