Timeliness adds impact to ‘Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’
“The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” couldn’t be more timely.
Written and first performed by monologue artist Mike Daisey in 2010, it is both a memoir of tech lust and an expose on the labor conditions endured by the Chinese employees who meet America’s insatiable demand for gadgets. The one-man show opened the season for Actors Theatre on Sept. 22, the day after the release of Apple’s iPhone 5, which topped 5 million sales in a weekend.
Then, the following Monday, news broke that Apple’s top manufacturer, Foxconn Technology, had closed down one of its Chinese plants after a riot involving more than 1,000 workers clashing with security guards.
The red-hot topicality of the piece is not the best reason to see it; rather, the genius of “Agony and Ecstasy” is the way it gives emotional resonance to the news through the passion and wit of its narrator.
In the Actors Theatre production, the “character” of Mike Daisey is given voice by Ron May. Best known as the artistic director of Stray Cat Theatre, May is not, by his own admission, the kind of actor who disappears into roles, but when there is a character that calls for his unique brand of nervous energy, he is hilarious and riveting. And “Agony” is a perfect match for his talents.
Spending most of the 90-minute performance sitting behind a desk, May-as-Daisey weaves his narrative about “the rise and fall and rise” of Apple with personal confessions of a tech junkie and all-around geek. He waxes poetic about industrial design and typefaces, rants about the aesthetic failings of PowerPoint (“Clip art makes my eyes bleed”) and gives a dead-on impersonation of the serrated screech of a dot-matrix printer.
All of this, of course, is a comical Trojan Horse designed to soften the audience up for his revelations about the price paid by the hundreds of thousands of Chinese employees doing painstaking handwork for hours on end, work so mind-numbing that it drove some of them to suicide.
At this point, I can no longer avoid revisiting — again — the controversy over “Agony and Ecstasy” that erupted earlier this year. After airing excerpts of Daisey’s monologue on public radio’s “This American Life,” producers discovered several fabrications in his narrative about his trip to Shenzhen, China, where he toured a vast Foxconn factory and interviewed many of its workers. “This American Life” issued an hourlong retraction episode that sparked months of debate over what the rules should be when the worlds of theater and journalism overlap.
The script used by Actors Theatre has been revised to remove the six minutes or so of discredited material, but if you’re aware of the backstory, you might find yourself putting mental asterisks on some of the revelations, pending a fact-check. selves off, killing themselves in a brutal and public manner.”
In reality, there were 14 suicides and six attempts in 2010. Shocking enough, to be sure, but not as much as Daisey’s “day after day” imagery.
Truthfully, though, that little bit of poetic license wouldn’t have made me bat an eye if it weren’t for the whiff of scandal that still surrounds this piece. And that is the most unfortunate facet of the whole affair, because the case against Apple remains a damning one.
Of course, “The Agony and the Ecstasy” isn’t a legal brief, it’s theater, and what works best about it is how Daisey uses trenchant humor and his own geektastic passions to implicate himself — and, vicariously, the audience — in some of the most disturbing realities of global capitalism.
It’s a guilt trip. But thanks to Daisey’s vivid writing and May’s energized performance, it’s the most entertaining guilt trip I’ve ever had.