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 Char leston, 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.  Tickets are $35. For a full performance schedule, visit voicesfestivalproductions.com. Director Aldo Billingslea and writer/performer Dan Hoyle 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.”  ABOUT THE CAST CREATIVES Dan Hoyle’s world premieres as writer/performer include Takes All Kinds (2024), Talk To Your People (2022), Border People (2019), Each and Every Thing (2014), The Real Americans (2010 updated in 2017), Tings Dey Happen (2007), and Florida 2004: The Big Bummer (2004). These shows have all been launched at The Marsh, and each has received critical acclaim. Hoyle’s Border People earned the highest rating from the San Francisco Chronicle, praising the production as “a testament to the core-to-nerve ending commitment and courage” of those living on borders of any kind. The critically acclaimed Each and Every Thing was declared “smartly constructed and highly entertaining” by the San Francisco Chronicle and a “poignant, funny comment on the digital age” by The Mercury News. Tings Dey Happen was awarded the Will Glickman Award for Best Play, while The New York Times called it “funny and poignant.” Aldo Billingslea (Director) is a professor of theater at Santa Clara University (SCU), where he teaches courses in performance and performance studies. Billingslea became SCU’s inaugural associate provost for diversity and inclusion and served as the vice president of the 100 Black Men of Silicon Valley. He also serves on the advisory board of Gritty City Youth Repertory Theater and on the Board of Regents for Archbishop Mitty High School. 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 Bottom, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Running and Radio Golf; Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and Anna Christie; Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; August Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and more than two dozen different plays by William Shakespeare. Billingslea has worked in the San Francisco Bay Area at the American Conservatory Theater, Aurora Theatre Company, California Shakespeare Theater, Cutting Ball Theatre, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, Magic Theatre, Marin Shakespeare Theatre, Marin Theatre, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, and Shakespeare Santa Cruz. He has also worked at Portland Center Stage, Tacoma Actors Guild, Sacramento Theatre Company, Theatre Three in Dallas, San Antonio’s Majestic Theatre, InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia, San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, and Shakespearean Festivals of California, Dallas, Marin, Oregon, and Utah. ABOUT VFP’S “VOICES FROM A CHANGING NATION” Voices Festival 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 Changing Nation” series presenting a collective portrait of those battling in the trench warfare of American democracy.  A three-night workshop reading of Alaudin Ullah’s The Halal Brothers runs November 6–8, bringing a Bengali-Muslim family of New Americans into focus in the mid 1960s, while Takes All Kinds brings us fully up-to-date.  Notes VFP’s Founding Artistic Producing Partner Ari Roth in a recent newsletter: “Woody Guthrie did not write about America from a desk. He rode the boxcars. He stood in relief lines. He sang the stories of migrant workers and mill hands because he had lived alongside them, and believed the only honest way to render a country was to go out and meet it.  Eighty years later, Dan Hoyle does the same thing with a notebook and a stage. For Takes All Kinds, Hoyle roams and rambles to the places where our country is actively arguing with itself. Then he brings those real people to the stage, rendering them in their own words, creating revelatory portraits. Different tools, same calling. Guthrie did it with a guitar, Hoyle does it with reporting and his own body. Both of them chase the same thing: the full, funny, complicated humanity of people that news headlines flatten into a type.” Takes All Kinds plays November 13 to 22, 2026, presented by Voices Festival Productions at Universalist National Memorial Church (where Spooky Action Theater performs), 1810 16th Street, NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets ($35, with under-30 tickets at $20) online. Takes All KindsWritten and performed by Dan HoyleDirected by Aldo Billingslea ABOUT VOICES FESTIVAL PRODUCTIONS Voices Festival Productions is an independent, DC-based production company developing and producing new works for the stage that stimulate debate and discourse, introspection and awareness, informed by revelation of our underlying humanity in all its color and complexity. Our work finds resonance between those living with conflict in the Middle East and closer to home, along the seams of our nation, and its very real, and perceived, divides. Two signature programs embody the heart of our mission: Voices From a Changing Nation and Voices From a Changing Middle East. Together, they bring some of the most compelling contemporary stories of identity, democracy, belonging, resilience, and coexistence to audiences throughout Washington. VFP’s most distinctive programming is its long-running Voices From a Changing Middle East Festival, which has been humanizing headlines while bringing the souls and struggles of those living in the Middle East — especially Israel and Palestine — to life for the past 26 years. Created in 2000 at Theater J by Ari Roth, and later moving across town to inaugurate Mosaic Theater Company in 2014, the festival has brought forth over three dozen full productions and many more workshop presentations. ...read more read less