Dreaming of Rob Ford - May 21 - 23
View attachment 26012
http://www.crowstheatre.com/product...performance-crawl/crawl-dreaming-of-rob-ford/
Mike Daisey has dreams of Rob Ford
Monologist known for The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs brings his latest work, based on Toronto's mayor, to the Crow's Theatre Crawl festival.
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2014/04/09/mike_daisey_has_dreams_of_rob_ford.html
Following is an except only; from:
http://www.vulture.com/2013/09/mike-daisey-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs.html
[h=1]How Mike Daisey Is Burying His Apple Scandal With Words[/h]
At the beginning of last year, Mike Daisey was ready to blow up. He had spent years nurturing a certain kind of intense but small-scale acclaim in the theater, performing haranguing, wistful monologues, which he never wrote down, to people who shared his core suspicions about the world — that we’re all ridiculous, that living requires some delusion, and that maybe we’re all just, in our semi-self-aware way, fucked. His critique of the mystical delights of consumer capitalism,
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, was adapted for “This American Life,” which made Daisey’s poly*morphous, principled outrage at last scalable beyond the cabaret. But then it all blew up in his face. The public-radio broadcast was retracted by host Ira Glass, and Daisey’s self-styled profile as a higher-purpose grouser-crusader beaten to hell because he … well, fudged some parts. Misled. Made some stuff up — you know, in the service of his dramatic ends, or polemical ends, or artistic something.
Which made for a lot of drama. Over a year later, he’s hoping that episode’s all behind him, having apparently worked out the trauma (for what it’s worth, his dad was a shrink for veterans with PTSD) in a series of performances that might seem a bit like onstage therapy sessions (including one on journalism and one on lying), as well as auditing a J-school class at NYU called “The Fiction of Non-Fiction.”
“I’d never had an opportunity to be in a class where I’m on the curriculum,” Daisey tells me, sitting on a bench on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, looking across to imperial Manhattan. It’s not too far from where he lives, in Carroll Gardens, and a place he often wanders when trying to puzzle out performances in his head. Daisey is a big man with a big head — a capacious ramshackle palace stuffed with fact, observation, humor, and lyrical ire. Or at least that’s what comes tumbling out onstage, where he sits, rubber faced, behind a table with notes and a bottle of water, gesturing and dabbing his inevitably sweaty forehead with a handkerchief, all the while holding forth on some indignity or hypocrisy or shaggy-dog irony or other — with the crowd usually transfixed. He’s great at it, reading the audience, surfing their moods, and giving them what they
want to know — which was, at least to those who expected him to recount only things that actually happened to him, the problem.
By the time of the “This American Life” broadcast, Daisey been touring for over a year with
The Agony and the Ecstasy, an investigation of his own ambivalent devotion to Apple — he still has an iPhone, and kept confusing his with mine — that developed new riffs and insights and anecdotes along the way. The excerpted version was a huge success—a rousing liberal-guilt two-step of flattering the audience by criticizing its complicity — and the show’s most popular podcast ever. But after it emerged that Daisey had embroidered parts of his story and then, worse, lied in the fact-checking process, Glass raked him over the coals. “If you get a chance to do it, you might not want to break up with your public-radio boyfriend on the air and then let him have the final cut of your interview,” Daisey says wanly.
Defiantly heroic in his own head, he never fully apologized, instead attempting a lonely quixotic defense of the higher purposes of art and a counter-critique of the concept of objectivity (even fans inclined to applaud his desire to make a difference squirmed at this). “I think it’s a weird thing that apology is actually like the politics of personal destruction—trying to force people to apologize as a way of dismantling them,” he says. “If I gave it too easily, I think I was really afraid it would not be enough. I was really afraid that all the work, all the emphasis on Apple, on the actual labor conditions, would evaporate.”
