He did it without a road crew, a huge budget or a safety net. He did it himself.

San Francisco actor and journalist Dan Hoyle spent 10 months in 2005 traveling the fiery landscape of Nigeria, meeting warlords, prostitutes, ambassadors, Scots and snipers. He endured a three-week bout of malaria and came out of it being teased by locals who told him it happens to everyone. He saw one guerilla fighter's doomed struggle to give up his guns and build a peaceful, educated life.

He has brought those people to the stage in the form of “Tings Dey Happen,” a two-hour, one-man show now enjoying the third extension of its hit run at The Marsh theater in the Mission.

“I'm always interested in art that's engaged with the world, and makes a rigorous effort to understand the world's complexities,” Hoyle, 27, said.

This interest shows through layered storytelling that is lavished with praise in press reviews, and by many others who have seen the show.

“He gave me a very intuitive sense of what's going on there,” said Michelle Svatos, a member of last Saturday's 100-person audience, which gave Hoyle an immediate standing ovation following the show. “He tried it from so many different perspectives,” Svatos said of the show’s many different characters.

Hoyle only lets those characters speak. He has left his own dialogue out of the script, because as one of his characters points out, there are too many white-man-in-Africa stories where “the Africans are just the wallpaper…. The white man comes, he sees terrible things, he learns, he gets on a plane and sips a cold soda on his way back home, and we clap for him.”

In framing the show this way he places the audience behind the camera, seeing the country as he experienced it, speaking only with the voices of Nigeria. His characters are always engaging an invisible visiting white man named Dan, and they treat Dan by turns as a big shot American actor, a silly white man come to play African, a friend, a customer, a mark, a hostage, a kind ear.

“Dan, there's going to be a lot of killings,” warns the sniper character, Okosi, in a phone call to Hoyle. Then he calls again, asking if his new plan to sell his guns and use the money to go to school is a good one.

Elsewhere in the show, a Scot working in Nigeria laughs and tells Dan that nobody asks Shell to build a school in Scotland. A Texan who tells Dan he's there “managing war” for Exxon says nobody is trying to change anything in Nigeria because all they want to do is leave.

In the second act, Hoyle plays a Nigerian prostitute who tries to sell herself to him. When he declines, she recoils and rages, and the scene cuts with her last, bitter line:

“The whites, they don't even fuck us anymore.”

It's the culmination of all these different voices and perspectives that builds the humanity of the show, and ultimately tells the story through Nigerians' experience, rather than the visiting American's.

“He has this theory about theatrical journalism,” said Diana Rathbone, a promoter for the theater. “I don't know if anyone else is doing this. But he wanted the story – the whole story. And he does whatever it takes.... We're so jaded when we read the papers, we give up paying attention. After this, maybe when people see something buried in the New York Times or the Chronicle, they’ll stop and notice.”

Hoyle funded his stay in West Africa by winning a Fulbright Scholarship. The program has sent over 100,000 American students to over 150 countries around the world, doing academic research with the theory that educational exchange humanizes other countries by putting real, individual faces on them. The results are often academic papers or lecture series.

Hoyle applied for the scholarship by submitting a proposal for a theater piece, along with his undergraduate transcripts from Northwestern University and some letters of recommendation.

He says he didn't expect a specific result – “The point is not to know what you're gonna say when you go” – but the idea of digging through Nigerian culture and coming back with art that represents and explores it was enough: Hoyle found out he'd been given the scholarship on the same day an international story broke that seven Chevron workers, including two Americans, had been slaughtered by militants on Nigeria's Benin River.

“Most of us wouldn't have that courage, to go to such a dangerous place to tell a story,” said Audre Newman, who attended Saturday's performance.

Surprisingly enough, Hoyle said finding his way into the world of warlords and guerilla fighters was the easy part.

“I wasn't scared of the militants, because they have an agenda, and I'm not a bad guy,” Hoyle said. “They want to get their story out, because from their perspective, once people see all the facts, they'll understand their side.”

“The point is to show Nigeria to the audience through Nigerian eyes,” Hoyle said. “You can do so much in an academic paper, but in this medium, you have the power to hit people harder.”

The Marsh just announced the show has been extended for a fourth time, through May 6.