This last week a theatre/journalism firestorm erupted when This American Life retracted a rebroadcast they did of Mike Daisey's monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. TAL discovered that not all of the events described by Mike had actually happened to him. When questioned by the factcheckers, Mike then lied about a number of the specifics. TAL then broadcast an hour-long retraction, which focused on an interview with Mike about why he lied, followed by a sequence on Foxconn manufacturing from a NY Times reporter.
Much has been twittered and blogged about Mike's personal culpability, the impact for political theatre today, etc. A lot of discussion has circled around his intent. I think we can only guess at what Daisey was thinking or what the future holds for him and this piece. Most of the socialsphere seem to agree that the widespread impact of Mike's powerful piece has now been dramatically undermined. Some have suggested that he can't perform at all anymore. The latter position seems more tied to journalists and tech bloggers than theater practitioners as they are contextualizing Mike's professional sin in the context of professional journalism.
But of course, context is everything. There is a sequence in the TAL retraction show where Mike asks to return for a followup interview. In this post-interview, Mike says that he stands by the work and believes in its power and reality, and that his key mistake was lying to translate it into the journalistic context of a Public Radio broadcast. I believed this, but it's also the sequence that seems to stick in the craw of many people I've talked to.
And here's the interchange that stuck with me so strongly (from the transcript):
Mike Daisey: ... 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. And I regret, deeply, that it was put into this context on your show.
Ira Glass: Are you going to change the way that you label this in the theater, so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth but in fact what they’re seeing really is a work of fiction that has some true elements in it.
Mike Daisey: Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.
Ira Glass: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people who go to see a person talk – people take it as a literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your nuclear show, I thought that was completely true. I thought it was true because you were on stage saying ‘this happened to me.’ I took you at your word.
Mike Daisey: I think you can trust my word in the context of the theater. And how people see it -
Ira Glass: I find this to be a really hedgy answer. I think it’s OK for somebody in your position to say it isn’t all literally true, know what I mean, feel like actually it seems like it’s honest labeling, and I feel like that’s what’s actually called for at this point, is just honest labeling. Like, you make a nice show, people are moved by it, I was moved by it and if it were labeled honestly, I think everybody would react differently to it.
Mike Daisey: I don’t think that label covers the totality of what it is.
Ira Glass: That label – fiction?
Mike Daisey: Yeah. We have different worldviews on some of these things. I agree with you truth is really important.
Ira Glass: I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says ‘this happened to me,’ I think it happened to them, unless it’s clearly labeled as ‘here’s a work of fiction.’
Mike Daisey: I really regret putting the show on This American Life
I don't know how "normal" a worldview is. I do know that one of the most essential qualities of the theatre is the core dichotomy between artiface and humanity. There is an implicit assumption of the suspension of disbelief in the theater. When a gifted actor sobs on stage, he/she is actually crying. With genuine feelings, honestly expressed. AND we are being lied to. We want this; we need it. An announcement at the top of the show that "this is fiction" changes the experience. Even if we know it is fiction. (I think there are other ways to accomplish this besides a disclaimer, of course.)
I saw the show at the Public a few weeks ago, and choked up in the now infamous "It's a kind of magic" scene, which is an amazingly effective moment on stage. I thought a lot about this. Was the power of the moment solely due to my perception of it as literal truth? That certainly punched it up; it made the scene inarguable.
But, if I knew the scene was fiction, how would it have felt?
On the one hand, I would have been given an escape hatch if the moment was too painful. On the other hand, I’m in the theatre to have that emotional experience. Would I have taken that hatch, and how much does the piece rely on an implicit “documentary” authority? A friend I saw the play with said the experience was ruined for her. She felt that the specific call to action of the piece made it expressly political theater (which she normally avoids) and felt that him acting as a reliable witness was the key thing that made the play work for her. Interestingly, she identified the touching the iPad scene as fictional but was unbothered. She is actually upset about the contextual wrapper around the event which owes a lot to its airing on public radio.
My experience was different. I went back and listened to the broadcast. I thought the moment was still powerful. Even knowing it was fiction, it brings these tensions of ownership and privilege and indebtedness and responsibility together in a powerful moment. Even fictionally. This is the second show of Mike’s I’ve seen, and what I’ve admired in his work was his genuine passion, and how it creates a storyteller’s joyful excess in the room that can be as offputting as it is engaging. (For example, a side rant during the performance of Agony suggested that genuine theater was actually happening and that most of us have never seen it before. That distracted me for several minutes, far more than the possibility that every event I was hearing about may not be literally true, even if it was emotionally true.)
Because that’s the license we grant the theater. The ability to emphasize, distort and color life to help us focus on a deeper truth. It is, ironically, also what This American Life does so well every week. TAL edits its work very brilliantly to create emotional impact. Because of its position on Public Radio, it must be excruciatingly careful in its editing to walk an ethical line. They are as manipulative as any piece of theater; it's why I love the show. To compensate, they must insist on total factual accuracy. No one, including Mike, argues that his piece didn’t cross TAL’s journalism lines. Again, context is everything.
Agony has also been called to question by Mike’s inclusion of a meeting with a worker poisoned with Hexane gas. (This is a factual event, it just didn’t happen to Mike.) One of the challenges that Mike has in constructing a monologue is the question of immediacy, what he calls "unpacking the narrative complexities." His pieces always cast himself as the core character. Is this transposition inappropriate for the theater? Of course not. Anyone who’s tried to do anything on stage knows that the theater is about immediacy. Things have to happen to the people in front of us, without that, there is no kinesthetic response in the audience, and we don’t experience it in our hearts and minds.
Ira calls Mike out for being “hedgy” but I think that response is ingenuous. Radio journalism gets its power from hearing information first hand. This is rarely an option for the live theatre. Ira may assume that If someone on stage says "this happened to me" that it is an experience functionally identical to what happens on This American Life, but I don't think they are the same. At all.
But of course, the piece was billed specifically as "non-fiction" at several venues, so I have huge sympathy for Ira and my friend, who described her post-revelation experience as "having been Fox Newsed." On the other hand, the piece did make her care, and she still does. She's just angry about the delivery mechanism. If she had been taken to a play "based on real events" rather than "non-fiction" her experience would have been more positive. She could have owned the insights in the piece rather than feeling manipulated into it. Perhaps no label should have been applied, allowing the audience to build their own beliefs. Who knows?
Despite these errors, Mike created a vivid and exciting piece of theater. Like him, I might regret its broadcast by TAL, but I think it's important that we not throw the baby out with the bath water.
What I thought was most effective about The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was the way the piece conflated the larger questions of global manufacturing and workers’ rights with our own personal relationship with that technology. The piece was more personal than polemic, and its core question was presented intimately and theatrically. Daisey made me consider my relationship to these distant places as a consumer. I'm typing this on an iPad. I might never use one again without thinking of the human effort required to create this object. And that is a truth, theatrical and factual, that can't be erased by controversy.
