Should theatre be held to journalistic standards? That’s one of the questions floating around now that “This American Life” has retracted its episode excerpting Mike Daisey’s monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” citing widespread fabrications in Daisey’s account of his trip to China.
On his blog, Daisey stood by his work, writing: “My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license…The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.”
Having seen many of Daisey’s monologues over the years, mostly at Joe’s Pub, I can attest to the hypnotic power of his storytelling. Daisey is profane and heavyset and sweats when he talks, which he does from behind a desk, with unblinking conviction. His presentation is part Michael Moore, part Spalding Gray, and part Cookie Monster, and his narratives braid citizen journalism with offbeat self-narration. In “If You See Something Say Something,” he framed a meditation on homeland security with an account of his visit to Trinity, the testing site of the Manhattan Project. In “How Theatre Failed America,” he critiqued the commodification of regional theatre while telling anecdotes about lovable drama teachers. Each time, I left the theatre electrified, in part because I took what I was hearing as non-fiction.
On its face, Daisey’s defense is perfectly sound: theatre, unlike journalism, should answer to no truth but an aesthetic one (which is a lot harder than it sounds). But Daisey’s work falls within the growing subgenre of “documentary theatre,” made popular by Moisés Kaufman’s seminal “The Laramie Project” and encompassing everything from “The Exonerated,” based on interviews with death-row inmates, to the ingenious troupe the Civilians, which has performed documentary musicals on everything from Ted Haggard to the Atlantic Yards.
Putting any one of these shows in a journalistic context like “This American Life” would have changed the ground rules (and “This American Life,” by fact-checking the piece in its original broadcast, realized this). But the shock, the fun, the power of documentary theatre derives from its claim on the truth, and the resulting trust of its audience. These plays ask for no suspension of disbelief, and in return they deliver what we perceive to be reality. My understanding of the working conditions at Foxconn comes predominantly from Daisey’s account, just as my perception of the events in Laramie following the death of Matthew Shepard stems from “The Laramie Project.”
But sometimes the truth gets in the way of a tidy Aristotelian narrative, and in Daisey’s case the desire to present a clean character arc, dramatic scenes, and a convincing denouement trumped accuracy. Perhaps the piece might have been stronger had Daisey embraced his own failures in the quest for information. But you can’t have it both ways, especially in the world of policy debate, which is necessarily a world of fact.
Of course, Daisey’s liberties only make it harder for Apple watchdogs to make their case. But the aspirations he had for the piece are worth preserving. Daisey wanted to infect us with the truth, person by person, in a way that theatre can do and reportage can’t. It would be a shame if the scandal cheapened either, or the inventive ways they can intertwine.
Photograph: Washington Post/Getty Images
