Dan Hoyle
Dan Hoyle is an actor, playwright, and journalist whose work at Mother Jones uses immersive reporting and a performer’s eye to show how people experience contemporary politics in their daily lives. His coverage focuses on the voices of ordinary Americans and people caught in political conflict, drawing on long stretches of fieldwork that also feed into his solo shows of “journalistic theater.” He writes narrative political essays that blur the line between reportage and monologue, using character-driven stories to examine persuasion, belief, and the emotional charge of public life.
“Journalism of hanging out” in troubled America
In his recent politics essay “What Americans Really Think in These Troubled Times,” Hoyle describes spending two years traveling the country to practice what he calls “the journalism of hanging out.” He conducts extended field research, including frequent audio recording and time spent well beyond formal interviewing, to understand how people talk and think when they are offstage.
The piece is built around conversations with election organizers, barbers, a troubled Iraq War veteran, and a survivor of a mass shooting, whose stories anchor his exploration of persuasion, polarization, and change. The article is filed under democracy, criminal justice, racism, mass shooting, and culture, underscoring that his political reporting follows individuals across multiple systems rather than a single narrow policy lane.
His through-line is to treat politics as something lived in barbershops, organizing meetings, and recovery from trauma, not just in campaigns and institutions.
Journalistic theater and the politics of persuasion
Hoyle integrates his reporting directly into solo theater shows, treating the stage as another way to investigate contemporary politics. In the same essay, he explains that the people he meets on the road become characters in his latest show, “Takes All Kinds,” which he describes as “journalistic theater” about the politics of persuasion and change. He embodies election organizers, barbers, war veterans, and shooting survivors onstage, re-creating his time with them and depicting their personal stories for live audiences.
Earlier work on oil politics in Nigeria led to the one-man show “Tings Dey Happen,” whose main character grew out of his reporting on a militant-turned-pacifist in the Niger Delta.
Another solo show, “The Real Americans,” draws on months spent traveling through small-town America, extending the same method of deep listening and character study into performance. Across these projects, his reporting and theater inform each other: people he meets in fieldwork become composite figures onstage, and his theatrical sense of timing and voice shapes how he writes about politics on the page.
Campaigns as theater in New Hampshire
Hoyle’s coverage of electoral politics uses theatrical language to analyze candidates as performers.
In his piece on the New Hampshire primary, he “sizes up the theatrics of the GOP performers who want to be America’s next top politician,” describing campaign events as acts in a sprawling festival. He compares rallies and town halls to site-specific one-man shows, writing about frigid football fields, gymnasiums, and factories as stages where candidates test personas before live audiences.
He attends these events specifically as a playwright and actor doing research for a new play, then writes a “quick review” of each act, treating speeches, staging, and crowd work as deliberate choices in a production. The approach turns campaign coverage into a form of performance criticism, emphasizing spectacle, character, and audience reaction alongside policy and strategy. For political stories, this makes him a fit when the subject involves image-making, message discipline, or the way candidates play to different rooms.
Oil politics and conflict in the Niger Delta
Hoyle’s earlier work on international politics follows the same character-centered method in a very different landscape. In “My Friend, the Nigerian Militant,” he writes about a sniper he met in the oil-producing region of the Niger Delta while researching oil politics for a planned play. He portrays his friend’s shift from militant to pacifist against a backdrop of conflict among militants, the Nigerian government, and multinational oil companies, noting that most of the country’s export revenue comes from oil pumped from the Delta.
The article builds out the village of Nembe as one of many communities caught in a struggle over resources and power, using one person’s arc to illustrate the human stakes of energy politics.
That reporting fed directly into his one-man show, with the militant’s story becoming the soul of the play and inspiring a central character. Taken together with his American material, the piece shows a consistent focus on how political and economic structures shape individual lives and choices.
Across these assignments and shows, Hoyle is distinguished less by a traditional beat and more by a method: he embeds with people over extended periods, listens in informal settings, and then translates what he learns into narrative essays and solo performances about politics. His work is suited to stories where the heart of the matter is how politics feels and functions on the ground - among organizers, workers, veterans, survivors, and citizens negotiating change - rather than a quick hit on the latest headline.
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Adam Daly
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Adam Sullivan
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