By: Matthew Kwatinetz

Master Storyteller Mike Daisey returns to Capitol Hill Arts Center for nearly a continuous month of his unique brand of theater beginning January 18 with Monopoly! (Buy Tickets) followed by How Theater Failed America (Buy Tickets) opening February 3. Mr. Daisey has been accused of many things, not the least of which is being scandolously innovative. This month LIVE WIRE had the opportunity to call him out on his unprecedented originality and has the following interview as evidence.

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LIVE WIRE: Thanks for joining us Mike! Can you describe the process of visioning and then creating a show?

MIKE DAISEY (MD): I follow my obsessions like it’s my job—because it is. Whatever it is that’s on my mind—the Iraq war, the open source movement, why we tell ghost stories, health care in America—whatever it is, I pay attention to it and collect stories about it and let it all simmer until one day, it suddenly becomes clear to me that I need to do a monologue about it. Next, before I’ve even built it, I need an audience, because the point of these shows is to communicate and achieve a kind of communion. If I were to write it out on my own, sitting in my room, or even performing it just for my director, that drive to communicate would become overshadowed and diluted, and the piece would suffer. So I convince a theater to put up the show, and then about 24 hours before opening night, I build an outline and then perform the piece from that outline. Once it’s been spoken out loud, my director, Jean-Michele Gregory, serves as an editor and will help me rip and re-order until we’ve boiled the monologue down to its essence.

LIVE WIRE: What led you to create a show based around the themes in Monopoly!?

MD: I had always been fascinated by Nikola Tesla’s war with Thomas Edison over the standards for electricity, and how that battle captured something very compelling about how market forces operate, and the conflict between individuals and corporations. Living in Seattle for years and knowing a lot of folks in the tech industry and tech journalism gave me grist for the mill with Microsoft and its status as a convicted abusive monopolist, and it intrigued me to consider their position today. Those two threads introduced me to stories about Wal-Mart, and the secret history of the board game Monopoly, and at that point it all began to roll together.

LIVE WIRE: Let’s move to How Theater Failed America. Isn’t it somewhat of career suicide to address this topic as a theater performer?

MD: It could be, but all great ventures begin with a wild leap--and I believe that the only people who can address the problems of theater are the artists living and working in the field, so I feel there’s an obligation for me to speak truth to power. At the same time I try to balance comedy and tragedy in my work, so I suppose I’m hoping that through both laughing and crying people will see some degree of what I value about the theater, and feel challenged to face the state that corporate-owned, moribund, goliath arts institutions have helped to bring us to.

LIVE WIRE: Has theater failed America?

MD: I think it clearly has--the American theater as an institution has been shrinking throughout my adult life, and no matter how you slice it theater matters less in popular culture today than it did even thirty years ago. The title is intentionally provocative because I tire of the mentality that the arts—theater included—is a kind of charity, or worse, broccoli: something that you should support because it’s good for you. The extension of this victimized viewpoint is that if theater is struggling in America (and it is) then it’s the fault of the public, the government, the world—certainly not us artists. We need to ask dangerous, painful questions about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and that’s what I hope this monologue can help to do.

LIVE WIRE: You could probably perform this monologue at many theatres. Why CHAC?

MD: One thing I love and admire about CHAC is your independence. Because you’re not a non-profit, you’re not in thrall to handouts from local corporations. Since I won’t be performing in the Bill Gates auditorium, you can produce a show like Monopoly! that, among other things, takes a hard look at Microsoft. Similarly, in How Theater Failed America I take aim at the failures of the regional repertory theaters. CHAC’s independence allows it to be fearless, and that’s why I love performing there.

LIVE WIRE: What is next for this show?

MD: How Theater Failed America will have its first performance at the Public Theater for the Under The Radar Festival, and then come to CHAC...and after leaving CHAC it’ll run at the Public Theater in Joe’s Pub for an extended engagement this April and May. I can’t think of a better way for us to have the show ready than working on it at CHAC--we’re tremendously looking forward to it.

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Read More about Monopoly! (Or Buy Tickets Now)

Read More about How Theater Failed America (Or Buy Tickets Now)

ABOUT MIKE DAISEY:
MIKE DAISEY has been called “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation” by the New York Times for his many monologues, which take on matters personal and historic, small and large, to illuminate an individual, a culture, and a world that is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious. His monologues include Monopoly!, TRUTH, Invincible Summer, Tongues Will Wag, The Ugly American, I Miss the Cold War, Great Men of Genius, Wasting Your Breath and 21 Dog Years, and over the past decade he has performed his unique brand of extemporaneous storytelling at venues such as the Public Theater, ACT Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, the Spoleto Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Cherry Lane, Yale Rep, the Noorderzon Festival, Portland Stage Company, Intiman, Performance Space 122, and many more.