You may have heard about Mike Daisey by now. He’s the monologuist who’s spent the past year and a half performing his new monologue, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which examines the links among Apple, industrial design and overseas manufacturing. Pieces of the monologue focusing on the harsh working conditions at Apple’s Chinese factories were excerpted on “This American Life” earlier this year. It made for an incredibly compelling hour of radio.
And then this happened. Daisey made a repeat apperance on “This American Life,” this time to answer to charges that he made a bunch of stuff up about his trip to the factories in China. It was compelling, too — this time in a raw, incredibly uncomfortable way as a Hulking-out Ira Glass deconstructed the lies.
After that show aired, Daisey gave a talk at Georgetown responding to the controversy (transcript here, audio here). He sounded defensive, even angry as he defended the greater impact of his work and condemned the media for focusing on him instead of the factories.
But when I spoke to him a few days later, he seemed contrite, content and ready to move on and fix his mistakes as best he could. It should be fascinating to hear him perform “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” at the Flynn Center on March 31. Will Daisey’s tale still resonate emotionally with the audience? Will people still care to listen?
Click here to read the full interview with Mike Daisey.
Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus
This article appears in Mar 21-27, 2012.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
How can people believe his recent post is a “frank” admission of contrition?
For starters, the phrase “after the storm” is, like so much of his writing, grandiose. He should have said, simply, “I’m sorry” — without obfuscating yet again, behind more sanctimonious, bloated, self-serving logic — this time to attempt to reclaim the trust of the powerful people who’ve dropped him by feigning contrition. (Where was his apology BEFORE The Public Theater dropped him?)
In addition, he does not apologize to the journalists whose work he ripped off as source material, then blasted for not having the guts to report the story to begin with (on which his fabrications were based); more grandiosity.
Most of all, he does not admit to, or apologize for, the simple crime of his ambition and arrogance inflating everything else: he doesn’t care about Chinese workers, he cares about Mike Daisey’s career, and telling a good story to build it. And that’s OK. But he doesn’t admit to it, masking his ego and ambition behind his feigned concern–which (we have seen) is built on fabrications. A real apology would therefore require a fundamental shift of his sense of self. And that did not happen in his too-long, self-serving, “if”-filled conditional missive.
Oh, and has anyone done the math on his claim, several months ago (on page 41 of his downloadable script) that 75,000 people have seen his show in over 200 performances? That’s 350 people a night. Guess what the capacity was at his space at the Public? 199.