By Claudia Parsons NEW YORK, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Actor-writer Dan Hoyle went to extremes to get into character for his latest work -- spending 10 months in Nigeria making friends with warlords and dope-smoking guerrillas known for kidnapping foreigners. The result is "Tings Dey Happen," a one-man show that opened off-Broadway in New York on Tuesday. Hoyle plays roles ranging from a fat, sweaty Scottish oil company worker to the U.S. ambassador, from a Nigerian prostitute to a bus driver who prays for the only white man on the bus. "This is not just another show saying, 'Look at this terrible thing that's happening in Africa,'" Hoyle said. "It's asking people to rethink the way they're looking at Africa." Hoyle, 27, from San Francisco, won a Fulbright Scholarship to study oil politics in Nigeria, the world's eighth-largest exporter and a source of crude for the United States. An 18-month campaign of kidnappings and guerrilla attacks on Western oil facilities has reduced output by a fifth and helped push oil prices rise to record highs. Hoyle wrote "Tings Dey Happen" by drawing on extensive interviews and improvising with the help of his director Charlie Varon. It examines the motivation of kidnappers as well as the difficulties facing the oil companies and aid workers. Sometimes he used stories and words almost exactly as told to him and sometimes he blended several characters into one. The one character he never plays is himself, although he is an invisible presence in most of the scenes that dramatize his trek to two remote villages in the Niger Delta, as well as the city of Port Harcourt, Nigeria's main oil industry hub. CONFLICTED DREAM In one scene the unlikely duo of British writer Graham Greene and comedian Richard Pryor appear to him in hallucinatory dream fueled by malaria drugs that shows his internal conflict about staying in such a dangerous country. Although he had a few hairy moments, such as when a group of rebels accused him of being a spy for oil major Chevron, Hoyle said the militants were mostly very media savvy. "Once they understood I was a researcher, they saw me as an ally because they felt if their story gets news, that's the best recourse they have," he said in an interview. Armed groups protesting neglect and poverty in the vast wetlands of the Niger Delta stepped up violence since the 1990s. Now the violence has broadened from targeted attacks by militants pressing political demands to an uncontrollable wave of abductions for ransom, armed robberies and gang wars. "It's not this black and white (situation), good and bad characters," Hoyle said, pointing to the rebel sniper who is a recurring character in the play. Initially the sniper is a sympathetic figure who dreams of going to a university. It later turns out he was involved in a massacre of a neighboring village. "My work tries to not tell people what to think but to encourage a way of how to think," Hoyle said. "Tings Dey Happen," whose title comes from Nigerian pidgin English, moved to an off-Broadway theater in Manhattan after winning rave reviews in San Francisco earlier this year. The San Francisco Chronicle called it "an aptly complex, hard-hitting piece that paints memorably touching and entertaining figures."
