Mike Daisey Insults Both Theater and Journalism

“Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it’s your power. It can't be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline.”

-- Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, p. 305.

Mike Daisey has long-ago earned the discipline of being a playwright. One of his plays “How Theater Failed America,” is actually a story about how he learned the act of play production and staging. Daisey knows how to command a stage, how to write a narrative, how to perform it and how to make the staging of such a thing profitable for both himself and the theaters he performs for.

These are incredible skills and Daisey can be proud of them. What they don’t give Daisey, however, are the skills of a journalist. They don’t even give him the difficult skill of interviewing someone, let alone interviewing someone through a translator and getting them to say meaningful things. They apparently don’t even teach him to take notes when you interview someone, which according to Daisey, he didn’t do which is why he doesn’t have an accurate count of how many factories he visited or how many secret union members he met with.

There’s a reason you take notes as a journalist and it’s not just to record what everyone says accurately for quotes. It’s because your memory is faulty otherwise.

Despite all this on some level Mike Daisey still wants to defend his play, at least as a play. As he told Ira Glass:

“I know that so much of this story is the best work I’ve ever made,” he says. “I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the theater.”

(He didn’t say those two sentences congruently, but he did say them.)

What Daisey wants to say, I believe, is: Look I made everyone care about workers’ rights in China. And I did that in a way that journalism never did. I made audiences care passionately about people they’ve never met or never thought of before. No it wasn’t my actual experience in China, but they were true experiences for other people, just not mine. So that makes it true because somewhere out in the world, it’s true.

Daisey says at least once in his play “I am not a journalist.” But then he goes on to tell the audience about things he says he’s seen and people he says he’s spoken to. I was there and you are not, let me tell you about it, is the definition of journalism. You are “reporting” what you’ve seen, and who you’ve spoken to, and what they said.

The original three-hour version of Daisey’s play that I watched, its debut in Washington, DC, contained an extremely strong critique of the New York Times. Hey I found these people in Shenzhen, Daisey basically said, it can’t be that hard for you reporters.

Mike Daisey doesn’t have the discipline of being a reporter. He doesn’t have the skills to ferret out secret information, to get reluctant sources to talk and to get them to say meaningful things. Maybe he thought all that was easy, that the act of going to China and talking to people made him enough like a reporter to pass.

Maybe he just doesn’t actually respect the work of someone like Charles Duhigg, who spends his career trying to find the stories Daisey invented. Or even the work of the producers of This American Life, who week after week actually do acts of journalism in a similar narrative form that Daisey aped.

But you get the sense that Daisey felt that, as a playwright, he could just pull everyone’s experience into one giant narrative. They did the work, that’s how Daisey knew about some of the things he talked about, so if he just incorporated things he read about, that would be okay. Someone else had done the legwork. It was “true,” wasn’t it? He wasn’t inventing things he’d never read about.

The ironic part of this was if Daisey had interviewed Charles Duhigg, and had stood on stage and pretended to be him, pretended to have seen things that Duhigg has seen and talk about people Duhigg had interviewed, no one would be calling him a liar today. In the world of theater, it’s not lying to pretend to have someone else’s experience. Daisey, instead of trying to ape the discipline of journalism in one trip, could have used work of real journalists work to tell their stories in a way they couldn’t have.

But Daisey’s work is always about himself. And maybe he enjoyed the thought that he could be both a reporter and a playwright (despite what he said every night he was on stage). That he had become a karate master of journalism skills that takes others years to learn. I found these stories, and you didn’t, he was taunted reporters.

Except that we know now he didn’t. He was relying on everyone else’s reporting to inform his own stories.

In the Retraction, one of the most infuriating parts of Ira Glass’s interview with Mike Daisey is that Daisey still defends his work as a piece of theater. While the world of journalists descends upon on Daisey, the world of theater should also feel equally insulted. Theater is supposed to make the audience care; either weep or laugh, or think, just as long as they feel *something* from what’s performed. But it’s harder to make audiences care about narratives they *know* are fiction. Making people weep over things that have not actually happened is hard work, but it happens every night on stages everywhere. Theater can also tell stories that are true, but are not the actor’s stories and incorporating someone else’s experience and portraying it is the very premise of “acting.”

But Mike Daisey isn’t an actor, he’s a con man. He tried to say “this is true, and this is my story.” But we know now it was neither. What Daisey did was no better than a cheap horror film that tries to con an audience into believing that “the events portrayed are real” in order to force them to feel something they wouldn’t otherwise.

And the sad thing is that by perpetuating his con, he’s now convinced everyone that horrors in Chinese factories probably aren’t real enough to be concerned with either.

Review of Mike Daisey's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

(UPDATE 3/17/12: By now if you've seen this page you've heard about The Retraction where This American Life, after airing a portion of "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," realized much of what Daisey said on stage was not true. Read my reaction "Mike Daisey Insults Both Theater and Journalism.")

Last night Mike Daisey premiered his new play “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” at Woolly Mammoth. It may have actually been the best play I’ve seen in years. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but after watching eight Fringe festival plays (including one that was a monologue), I’m convinced there aren’t too many others out there can keep you entertained for three hours merely by talking. But not just entertained. By the end of you will look at your beloved Apple products differently.

The format follows a familiar path that Daisey uses in his monologues, he tells two stories in sections: one a historical tale, the other a personal narrative of travel, both of which will eventually intersect. “The Agony and the Ecstasy” continues themes Daisey was exploring in his last outing “The Last of the Cargo Cults” about the “stuffness” of our material goods – items that Daisey shares the audience’s enthusiasm for. But in “Agony and Ecstasy” Daisey is on much more familiar ground: the coolness of Apple products, and their ultimate costs. In a really funny narrative, Daisey tells the history of Steve Jobs and Apple. Maybe you’ve heard the familiar story before? The charisma of Steve, the geekiness but technical genius of Wozniak? Someone behind me was quietly tracking the key points in the history like “Sculley” and “NeXT.”

But Daisey addresses the issue of who’s geek cock is bigger. It may be yours, he concedes -- although he does brag that used to fieldstrip and clean his MacBook Pro for fun the way other generations cleaned their glocks. But he tells the unknown geek in the audience that when you get over your social problems you can get on stage and narrate your own history. For now this is Daisey’s tale.

It’s a pretty interesting tale too, one that almost makes me wonder if plays can be their own form of journalism. Coming on the heels of the Jobs press conference where he finally admitted there were some technical problems with the iPhone’s design the play feels so relevant its steams with freshness. (The press conference wasn’t mentioned, but Daisey’s monologues do change over time. He may add a bit about it later). Daisey, an Apple fanatic, spends hours on the Mac rumor boards and eventually learns of an iPhone user who found that his phone came with photos stored inside. They were test pictures at the factory, which lead Daisey to wonder where this factory was? Who were these people who built the cool shit we all rely on?

This eventually leads him to the Chinese city of Shenzhen, a city so large that almost no one in the West had even heard of it. Shenzhen is where everything we play on, call from, or type on is made. The Apple products and the Dell products are made on assembly lines next to each other.

But it is the workers in the factory who interest Daisey. He tells the story of a manager who lost one of 13 iPhone prototypes and instead of getting his house raided, ala Gizmodo, he is beaten by his employer for 12 hours and then told he will be turned over to the police the next day. He chooses to commit suicide. But before he does he posts messages on the internet which is how the story begins to leak out about the treatment of the factory employees who make our stuff.

Daisey, against advice from journalist friends who work in China and Hong Kong, travels to Shenzhen with a fixer. He’s there when the news of the 12 factory suicides at the “iPad factory” becomes international news. So he stands outside the factory and talks to whomever will talk to him. And they do talk. He finds a 12-year-old, 13-year-old, and a 14-year-old girl who work there. He hears what happens to a worker after a 32-hour shift on the floor. He sees the sleeping conditions of beds stacked like cordwood in a 10 x 10 foot room.

While a three hour play without an intermission might seem long, any discomfort ones feels sitting that long immediately goes away when you hear what happens to the human body after sitting down and making the same repetitive motions for 12 hours straight.

When the New York Times publishes its story about the suicides, he says he can “pull it apart like taffy” and recognizes each and every press release every quoted person’s statement comes from. There was no real reporting done, he was the only “media” there and he was just pretending to be a journalist.

Daisey’s message is not that his audience should have known these stories. He’s opinionated but his message does not come off like a polemic. He didn’t know these facts and he stood in line for an iPad on the first day like everyone else. The question is now that you know, what are you going to do about it?

At the end of the night, Daisey said that he will be taking his show on tour, which includes a five-city tour of India. I have to wonder what Indian workers will think of their Chinese counterparts and what stories might get added to the show when it returns to DC in Spring 2011.

I would also pay a lot of money to see what audiences in San Francisco make of Daisey's tales.