Mike Daisey
is freshly returned from Melbourne via the small island of Tanna in Vanuatu. If this seems like a circuitous route to the
in beautiful, dangerous romantic downtown Culver City, well, it sort of is.
Daisey, the New York based monologist who bears a slight resemblance to the actor Kevin James, is at the Douglas to share his thoughts first on the state of American theater, and second on a cargo cult on Tanna as mirror to the international financial crisis.
“How Theater Failed America” is a well tested and well traveled piece in which Daisey takes on - and takes to task - the American regional theater system especially its treatment of actors. “The Last Cargo Cult,” the Tanna piece, is still in workshop form, although with Daisey’s scriptless, evolving thoughts format, it could be suggested that his monologs never stop being works in progress.
Given its chomping-the-hand-that-feeds-you subject matter, “How Theater Failed America” has stirred up a bit of controversy. Daisey maintains that any actor who isn’t already embedded in the regional theater system could not express some of the things he’s saying publicly without risking career suicide.
Daisey a self described “independent contractor“ - doesn‘t have that problem.
“There’s a lot of repression. We don’t talk about what the landscape is like,” he said. “I kept thinking about these issues. The more I learned, the more I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I had to find a way to talk about them in way that was not didactic by weaving my own story about moving through the American theater, and my assessment of the shape of things today.”
“We want to make a performance a hospitable friendly welcoming space,” he continued. “It gets unpleasant for people if they paid $75 to actually become vividly aware of how much an Equity actor is making in a production. Audiences like to passively believe that people are paid a living wage. It makes them feel better.”
The four performance engagement, Wednesday through Saturday, March 18-21 at 8 p.m. Following Friday’s performance, there will be a round table discussion co sponsored by the L.A. Stage Alliance on the state of American theatre, featuring CTG Artistic Director Michael Ritchie, Odyssey Theatre Artistic Director Ron Sossi and others. "The Last Cargo Cult" performs at 3 p.m. Sunday March 22 only.
If you want a sampling, check out Daisey’s website. The artist and his works are all over Youtube including a snippet of “How Theater Failed America” and a rather astonishing performance of his monolog “The Invincible Summer” at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge. In the middle of the performance in question, just after Daisey had been using an explicit encounter with Paris Hilton to make a point, 87 members of a Christian group in the audience rose to their feat and left the theater, one of whom doused Daisey’s notes with a water bottle on his way out the door.
Does the monologist live and work to incite these kinds of reactions? Well, duh!
“Provocation gets a bad wrap in America due to some puritanical underpinnings in society,” Daisey said. “Provoking a response is not the same as shock and spectacle. It’s possible to provoke a response in an intelligent, measured and fulfilling way. I’m touched by the theater and by idea of people coming together for a living experience. In performing monologs, I’m interested in what’s possible when you get people in room together.
Especially when the subject is the theater.
“You need a trust fund to work in the theater. Nobody else can afford to,” he said. “We are drifting out of touch with mainstream American culture. If we can’t generate support for people working in theater, if we can’t find ways to show that it’s even a priority, I don’t know how we can be advocates to the rest of the world, telling them theater is valued and that the theater demands support.”
I asked whether this was Daisey’s first time in L.A. with a live performance. In fact, it wasn’t. Back in 2002, he did a shortened showcase of one his monologs at the Coronet Theatre as an exhibition for studio executives.
The experience, he recalls, required trimming his work down to be palatable to short attention spans. Daisey earned a nicely paying HBO gig, and felt like a whore.
“I totally caved. I did this thing I knew artistically was a terrible idea,” Daisey said. “And it worked. The executives saw what wanted to see. It was a terrible live experience, but it’s valuable now in retrospect.”
Comments