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Through this weekend, the Actors Theatre in Phoenix will stage Mike Daisey’s The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
The screenplay, written by Daisey, who’s a monologist, author, and solo performer based in New York City, was released to the public under a creative commons licence and has been performed by theater companies around the country.
Curator, writer, and New Times’ theater critic Robrt Pela recently saw Ron May of the Actors Theatre perform Daisey’s monologue.
He writes:
Indeed, even while I was thrilled to watch this fine actor wail and gnash his teeth and pontificate, my mind kept wandering back to the firestorm that erupted earlier this year when it was revealed that big hunks of Daisey’s story about the dire working conditions in Apple’s China factories had been embellished or invented.
After an expurgated version of Daisey’s show aired on Public Radio International’s This American Life last spring, it was discovered that Daisey had fictionalized some of the interviews he claimed to have made with workers at Apple’s slave-labor Foxconn factory in China. TAL retracted the piece, and Daisey later returned to the program to apologize and to defend his right to “shape a narrative” because he’s a “theater artist.”
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs continues through October 7 at the Herberger Theater Center, 222 E. Monroe St.. Tickets are available through the Actors Theatre website.
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