Daisey at Disney, and in the desert

Cinderella's Castle at Disney World in Florida.

The trouble with Mike Daisey's American Utopias, which opened ArtsEmerson's "The Next Thing" festival on Friday night (sorry, it closed Saturday) is pretty obvious - and ultimately pretty irritating: it never coheres the way his best work does.  Instead it just rambles along, behind Daisey himself, as he checks out Disney World, and Burning Man (the annual hippie-Thunder-Dome bash in the Nevada desert - the next one begins August 26), and then doesn't check out Occupy Wall Street, but feels guilty about ignoring it instead.

And why doesn't the monologue cohere, you may ask?  Well, if you played a quick game of "What Doesn't Belong?" with this script, most people would agree that last year's doomed protest at Zuccotti Park does not belong next to Disney World and Burning Man.  The reasons, again, are obvious: Burning Man and Disney World are both essentially theme parks (even if Burning Man is only a temporary one; their iconography has begun to converge, as you can see in the posted photos). Disney World is a fantasy about pre-puberty and the suppression of sex; Burning Man is a fantasy about puberty, and, well, sex.  But beyond that, they're remarkably similar; both are ticketed events ($380 for Burning Man this year!), both lean heavily toward group participation, both peddle "thrills" and "awesomeness," both require tons of planning to visit (and far more to construct!), etc., etc.

Daisey is, amusingly, a fish out of water in both environments; he's childless, so he can't relate to just how many kids there are at Disney; and, well, he's none too comfortable with the nudity and general orgiastic atmosphere at Burning Man, either.  (Daisey at left; dudes at Burning Man, at right - not that they all look quite that good.)

So, properly alienated, Our Narrator casts his usual gimlet eye on the goings-around him, and both the hyper-competitive, anxious "fun" at Disney and the laid-back nude-beach-lizard vibe at Man come in for some well-deserved knocks.  But Daisey rarely attempts to synthesize his experiences at each into anything like a statement (word has it that an earlier version included a "dream sequence" in which Walt Disney wandered through Burning Man; I vote that be restored!).  If he ever gets around to doing so, though, I think Daisey could have the beginnings of a classic on his hands.

But alas, interlarded with these musings are what amount to a non-starter: his odd decision to avoid Occupy Wall Street (even though he lives in Brooklyn!).  All Daisey offers for a motive here is that he didn't want to look "dorky."  Really? I hate to break this to you Mike, but . . .  oh, well, never mind!  And honestly, if you can't even bother to take the subway to Zuccotti Park, how do you expect to us take seriously your fulminations against Bloomberg, capitalism, etc., etc.?

The hot men of Burning Man.

Indeed, if Daisey had visited Occupy Wall Street, I can't imagine he would have tried to triangulate it with Disney and Burning Man; nor, I think, would he have categorized all three as "utopias;" the shock of seeing the grungy, from-the-ground-up attempt at a true utopia that for a time occupied Zuccotti Park would have ended any such illusions about EPCOT, Black Rock City, et al.

So what we're left with is an idiosyncratic ramble that frustrates more than it enlightens (although to be fair, it does enlighten a bit).  I have to also mention that as if to add insult to injury, after cheerfully admitting that he dodged any engagement with Occupy, Daisey leads the audience out into the street for a shot at conjuring some faux political commitment that really set my teeth on edge.  As a frequent visitor and supporter of Occupy Boston, this self-aggrandizement pretty much pissed me off, and only recalled the sense of egotistical delusion that allowed him to swear repeatedly that he personally saw the labor abuses of Apple and Foxconn in China. (And for the record, Daisey skeptics have already picked apart a few of the claims in American Utopias; so no, he hasn't entirely changed his ways.)

Of course, Mike Daisey is still entertaining, even when he doesn't really have much to say.  His fans will be glad to hear that he once again has constructed (under the direction of his wife, Jean-Michele Gregory) an elaborate vocal and emotional roller coaster (which is hardly spontaneous, though, whatever his claims; whenever he pauses, you can see that he simply has hit a glitch in the tape reel running in his head).  Daisey thunders and bellows; he whispers, giggles and squeaks; his hands twist and flutter, and enact a thousand dances; he's like some crazed, avenging Buddha, and as ever, the contradictory vision of his enormous theatrical energy remaining utterly anchored and still behind his little wooden table is, for a time, mesmerizing.  But as his script runs on and on, that hypnotic atmosphere slowly drains away.  And we're left wondering why this notorious paragon of the theatrical left thinks it's "dorky" to occupy anything other than Disney.

Burning Man 2012 - even the architecture tells you it and Disneyland have begun to converge.

That iPhone whiner sketch on SNL was one of their best . . .

Here it is again, in case you missed it.  (Sorry for the ad!  Hat tip to Mike Daisey, who else.)

I know, I know, I have to write about Mike Daisey, and the ongoing battle between levels of "truthiness"

But I also have a lot of reviews to plow through.  (Unlike many other bloggers, I actually go to the theatre and review it!)  As you may have picked up from my comments around the 'sphere, however, I'm somewhat in sympathy with Daisey, and certainly in sympathy with his cause, and I'm skeptical of people like Ira Glass calling foul, when the entire "verbatim theatre" field has been rife with exaggeration and prevarication from the beginning.

Still, it's worth noting that now people are popping out of the woodwork with the goods on earlier Daisey pieces, such as 21 Dog Years, his supposed "memoir" of his years working at Amazon.  Here's an interesting blog post from one of Daisey's co-workers calling the piece "truthy," at best.  For instance, in an interview about the show, Daisey made the following claim:

Seattle Weekly: How much did you really deal with Jeff [Bezos, CEO of Amazon], and have you heard anything from former co-workers about his reaction to the show?

Daisey: I saw Jeff all the time, almost every day.

I worked like 100 meters from Daisey, and saw Bezos maybe three times in as many years. Like I said: truthy . . . In the context of an interview, "I saw Jeff all the time is a lie, plain and simple."


Daisey in mid-fib on Bill Maher.

But the blogger adds:

But if Daisey said the same thing on stage as part of “21 Dog Years”, I wouldn’t have objected. I guess I agree with Daisey when he says that the tools of theater are different than the tools of journalism . . . After all, no one thought that all of the workplace events recounted by David Sedaris in “Santaland Dairies” were literally true, and that story was everywhere. Heck, it had even appeared on everyone’s favorite radio show, “This American Life”.

I think what is opening up for me about this whole episode is the intriguingly naive way in which the culture has come to worship first-person authenticity - even though over and over again, we see the supposedly "authentic" biographies we've invested in come crashing down around us as mosaics of half-truths and outright lies. What does this say about us? Why are we locked in this trust/distrust tango with the authorial voice?

Meanwhile, Gawker has laid down a snarky challenge - anybody want to fact-check The Last Cargo Cult?

Developing: This American Life backs away from Mike Daisey, says he "lied" about visits to Apple/Foxconn factories; Daisey admits to "fabricating characters," but stands by his work

This American Life has suddenly announced that it is withdrawing its piece on Mike Daisey's The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and will "devote its entire program this weekend to detailing the errors" in their previous story.  Full press release below:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE / FRIDAY MARCH 16

This American Life Retracts Story
Says It Can’t Vouch for the Truth of Mike Daisey’s Monologue about Apple in China

This American Life and American Public Media’s Marketplace will reveal that a story first broadcast in January on This American Life contained numerous fabrications.

This American Life will devote its entire program this weekend to detailing the errors in the story, which was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s critically acclaimed one-man show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” In it, Daisey tells how he visited a factory owned by Foxconn that manufactures iPhones and iPads in Shenzhen China. He has performed the monologue in theaters around the country; it’s currently at the Public Theater in New York. Tonight’s This American Life program will include a segment from Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz, and interviews with Daisey himself. Marketplace will feature a shorter version of Schmitz’s report earlier in the evening.



When the original 39-minute excerpt was broadcast on This American Life on January 6, 2012, Marketplace China Correspondent Rob Schmitz wondered about its truth. Marketplace had done a lot of reporting on Foxconn and Apple’s supply chain in China in the past, and Schmitz had first-hand knowledge of the issues. He located and interviewed Daisey’s Chinese interpreter Li Guifen (who goes by the name Cathy Lee professionally with westerners). She disputed much of what Daisey has been telling theater audiences since 2010 and much of what he said on the radio.

During fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey’s story, This American Life staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter’s contact information. Daisey told them her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn’t work any more. He said he had no way to reach her.

“At that point, we should’ve killed the story,” says Ira Glass, Executive Producer and Host of This American Life. “But other things Daisey told us about Apple’s operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn’t think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake.”

The response to the original episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” was significant. It quickly became the single most popular podcast in This American Life’s history, with 888,000 downloads (typically the number is 750,000) and 206,000 streams to date. After hearing the broadcast, listener Mark Shields started a petition calling for better working conditions for Apple’s Chinese workers, and soon delivered almost a quarter-million signatures to Apple.

The same month the episode aired, The New York Times ran a front-page investigative series about Apple’s overseas manufacturing, and there were news reports about Foxconn workers threatening group suicide in a protest over their treatment.

Faced with all this scrutiny of its manufacturing practices, Apple announced that for the first time it will allow an outside third party to audit working conditions at those factories and – for the first time ever – it released a list of its suppliers.

Mike Daisey, meanwhile, became one of the company's most visible and outspoken critics, appearing on television and giving dozens of interviews about Apple.

Some of the falsehoods found in Daisey's monologue are small ones: the number of factories Daisey visited in China, for instance, and the number of workers he spoke with. Others are large. In his monologue he claims to have met a group of workers who were poisoned on an iPhone assembly line by a chemical called n-hexane. Apple's audits of its suppliers show that an incident like this occurred in a factory in China, but the factory wasn’t located in Shenzhen, where Daisey visited.

"It happened nearly a thousand miles away, in a city called Suzhou," Marketplace’s Schmitz says in his report. "I’ve interviewed these workers, so I knew the story. And when I heard Daisey’s monologue on the radio, I wondered: How’d they get all the way down to Shenzhen? It seemed crazy, that somehow Daisey could’ve met a few of them during his trip."

In Schmitz's report, he confronts Daisey and Daisey admits to fabricating these characters.
"I'm not going to say that I didn't take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard," Daisey tells Schmitz and Glass. "My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it's not journalism. It's theater."

Daisey's interpreter Cathy also disputes two of the most dramatic moments in Daisey's story: that he met underage workers at Foxconn, and that a man with a mangled hand was injured at Foxconn making iPads (and that Daisey's iPad was the first one he ever saw in operation). Daisey says in his monologue:

He's never actually seen one on, this thing that took his hand. I turn it on, unlock the screen, and pass it to him. He takes it. The icons flare into view, and he strokes the screen with his ruined hand, and the icons slide back and forth. And he says something to Cathy, and Cathy says, "he says it's a kind of magic."

Cathy Lee tells Schmitz that nothing of the sort occurred.

"In our original broadcast, we fact checked all the things that Daisey said about Apple's operations in China," says Glass, "and those parts of his story were true, except for the underage workers, who are rare. We reported that discrepancy in the original show. But with this week’s broadcast, we're letting the audience know that too many of the details about the people he says he met are in dispute for us to stand by the story. I suspect that many things that Mike Daisey claims to have experienced personally did not actually happen, but listeners can judge for themselves."

"It was completely wrong for me to have it on your show," Daisey tells Glass on the program, "and that's something I deeply regret." He also expressed his regret to "the people who are listening, the audience of This American Life, who know that it is a journalism enterprise, if they feel betrayed."

Daisey, who is currently performing the piece in New York, has countered with a short statement on his blog:

I stand by my work. 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 to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by The New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic ­- not a theatrical ­- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.

What can I say but "Stay tuned!"?

Mike Daisey, "When the Clock Strikes"

"A piece of shit, wonderfully executed."

You can't help but admire Mike Daisey when you're watching him - even when, as was the case this New Year's Eve in Boston, he has nothing coherent to say, and has tied up his performance in a narrative knot (and knows it).

Or should I say that's especially when you can't help but admire him?  For it's precisely at such times (i.e., when he's spinning his wheels) that Daisey's technique is at its most obvious, and also its most impeccable: when his voice is soaring into a carefully punctuated bellow, then swooping into a whisper for no apparent reason - that's when you ooh and aah internally over his physical control. When the arms are at one moment swinging like mallets, then the next, slipping through the air as sinuously as an odalisque's - it's only then that you realize this sumo-sized guy, whose eyes glitter with madness, and who is forever beading out in sweat because he's so aquiver with indignation, is actually enacting a kind of self-conscious ballet for your benefit; with utter focus and relentless discipline, he is sculpting an evanescent (indeed invisible) dramatic sculpture - a virtual persona - for your contemplation and edification.

And the fact that whatever he's doing, it counts as a still life, is intrinsic to the weird pull of his theatrical presence.  Daisey's affect is all outrage unleashed, and yet he's absolutely and completely tethered, rooted to the spot behind the bland table that serves as pedestal for his notes.  And around him there is no set, no context, nothing - indeed, at the Huntington here in Boston, the fact that the beginnings of the set for God of Carnage were in place behind him led to a ten-minute diatribe about that particular play ("A piece of SHIT, but wonderfully executed!").  Daisey was clearly unsettled by the presence of a theatrical frame - perhaps because he's aware that his caged rage operates best in a vacuum; it can't, and shouldn't, get any dramatic traction; the "fourth wall" must be sealed around him like shrink wrap, so that he floats before us like a bitter genie pickled in his own rhetorical bottle.

This is what makes so many folks giggle at his expectorations; Daisey's harangues, though precisely targeted, and delivered with Old-Testament-level authority, are nevertheless so clearly helpless that their intensity tickles us, the same way that the doomed monomania of a cartoon character does.  Only beneath this superficial response, I think there lurks a somewhat deeper resonance: the impotence of Daisey's anger maps to a new sense of social incapacitation in the zeitgeist.  For there's no shared culture anymore to channel the fury of a funny scold like him; Daisey's wicked riffs can't land, can't have any effect on their targets.  Like the guy left hanging by tech support, and the smartphone user who can't access an app, Daisey is dangling, cut off by the grid from personal efficacy.  And politically, things may be even worse;  he can scream shame on any number of social and cultural miscreants all he wants, but shame no longer exists.  Hence the essential stasis of his show.  And the sense that within our lubricated social shells, we're much like him.

I admit that all this came to mind, however, because the text of his Boston show, "When the Clock Strikes" - a loose meditation on the general lousiness of New Year's Eve - was intermittently amusing, but so meandering as to have been almost maddening (if I'd been paying close attention to it, that is).  It was, I suppose, a tour of sorts of his psyche, as Daisey tilted at his usual windmills - capitalism is sucking/has sucked your soul, but you are a hopeless hypocrite anyway (just like me!),  and then this other WEIRD thing happened, did I tell you about my wife and the Nazi - oh maybe not, but you're a puritan anyway (or are you a marauding drunk?), which is funny because right now I am basically jerking off into your mouth.  Har-de-har. I think he repeated that last bon mot twice - which really made me think the show should have been titled "A Taste of Mike Daisey."

There were certainly some punchy moments in this psychological mystery tour, but a mood of showbizzy hypocrisy pervaded it, too - Daisey's such a knowing observer of snobbery that the precision of his satire betrays an unspoken allegiance to its targets; after punching down Yasmina Reza, for instance, he sighed that "all pop culture and literature" is now about a handful of neighborhoods in Brooklyn.  Somehow I missed that - but then I'm an alcoholic puritan, right?  (At least I don't live in Connecticut, though!)

Oh, well, as I said, it was the performance that made the show - Daisey admitted as much himself, quipping that, like Yasmina Reza, he might well be presenting "a piece of shit, but wonderfully executed."  (Just as he likewise shouted that he was a hypocrite - you often sense in Daisey the nervous desire to pre-empt any and all critique.)  At any rate, if you'd like to check the performance out for yourself, you can - Daisey has posted the audio on his website.  I think even from an MP3 you can appreciate the hypnotic, almost-musical cadence of his delivery - and perceive that with better material, he could put on quite a show.  I've been hoping for some time that a local presenter (like ArtsEmerson, hint hint) might bring his monologue on Steve Jobs to Boston - if any town needs to see that, it's this one; and "When the Clock Strikes," if it did nothing else, made me hunger for that opportunity all the more.

The Daisey Chain, Part the Second

The non-actor dares another audience member to spill his water.

Well, when last we left the ongoing debate about actors' salaries initiated by the erstwhile Mike Daisey, Mr. Daisey (btw, I came across the photos below on his blog, and felt they might make a refreshing change for those tired of Michael Phelps) was letting it be known in no uncertain terms that HE WAS NOT AN ACTOR (no argument here!) and also that I had admitted that HE WAS RIGHT.

Hmmmm. But did I really do that? I wonder if the ladies pictured below would agree! Let's take a closer look!

What I said in my earlier post was: (warning - images NSFW)

The fact that [Mr. Daisey's] cries for justice simultaneously operate as a means of self-promotion - for a show that, inevitably, takes paying jobs away from other actors - only means that he's a hypocrite, not that he's wrong.

Now I think most people would read the phrase "not that he's wrong" as a kind of rhetorical device. (I know that sounds awfully sophisticated, but work with me here!) Now, certainly I agree with Mr. Daisey's premise - actors aren't paid enough - but then, who doesn't? Has anyone been arguing that actors are paid enough (much less too much)? If that had been the essence of Daisey's argument, there would have been no reaction to it in the first place.

So can we be honest, and admit that this was not, truly, the thrust of his various diatribes? Which means that, yes, Mr. Daisey could still be wrong? Or at least only partly right, hard as that may be to believe?

Yes, I think we can. So let's continue our consideration of his position. Although any summary does some violence to a thesis, I still think we can roughly-yet-validly summarize Mr. Daisey's true arguments as something like:

1. Actors's salaries are low because of the decisions of theatre administrators.

2. These administrators have chosen to invest in facilities, marketing, and their own salaries rather than in actors.

3. The solution to this problem is to place actors in administrative roles, from which they will be able to remunerate themselves appropriately.

That seems to me to be the gist of his contentions (and trust me, if I've left anything out, I'm sure Daisey will let us know). Of these, #1 is at least partly true, but only in a superficial way, and I've answered part of #2 in a previous post (investing in facilities, particularly in a low-interest-rate environment, was probably a good idea, and perhaps better for the long-term health of an organization than investing in salaries).

But it's the villainy Daisey seems to attribute to theatre administrators regarding their own salaries that has raised the most ire, particularly from Todd Olson, a small theatre director with whom Daisey has tangled in a number of posts. Olson's general point seems to have been that while there was some truth to Daisey's critique of the largest LORT theatres, his arguments fell apart further down the scale. And Olson had some telling points to make against Daisey's claims regarding administrators and their cushy finances - indeed, at his small company, many administrators actually envied the benefits that Equity actors commanded. And he almost amusingly deconstructed the contradictions in Daisey's la-la-land economic pronouncements (Daisey demands on the one hand that salaries be raised, and on the other that ticket prices be cut).

Most daringly, he challenged Daisey to help him more equitably balance his theatre's budget - and even forwarded the previous year's balance sheets. Daisey backed away from that offer, of course (because after all, engaging with Olson would dilute the product he's selling - i.e., disenfranchised outrage), but he did make a new suggestion - that Olson and his ilk should create "lockbox endowments" to fund actors' salaries.



Now on the surface this sounds better than his earlier solution - placing actors in administrative roles - because that idea is probably about as viable as placing administrators in acting roles! In short, "collective" solutions inevitably sacrifice the great productive advantage of specialization - indeed, Daisey seems to implicitly imagine that marketing, fundraising, etc., are not talents in their own right. (He is, in his own way, a hopeless snob.) Now before you say it, I'm sure there are some actors that would be great marketers (and of course there are some great marketers who can also act!) But lived experience whispers to us that these examples of overlap are the exception, not the rule - and the "successful" collectives Daisey tends to cite - garage theatres in which everybody walks home from a performance with $50, for example - do not seem to match his ideal of "stability, salaries and health insurance."

So there remains the tricky problem of raising actors' salaries in something like the current model, which is only fair, but which economic logic seems to preclude. As I've pointed out previously, the union is ham-strung by "wage-price disease" and declining demand. Begging for higher wages from administrators who themselves feel under-compensated (Todd Olson's point) can likewise only go so far. The only remaining option, therefore, is shaping a viable format for donations to an actors' endowment - those "locked boxes" Daisey made reference to. (Wait a minute - isn't that Sean Lamont at left? He wasn't on Mike Daisey's blog! What's going on?)

But how to go about making a case for an, um, actors' endowment in these economic times? Well, how do other performing arts organizations square this circle? Symphonies, of course, tend to endow chairs, once they have the donor base, and this could be a transferable model at some well-established theatres. But the devil, of course, may be in the details. When an orchestra donor pays for a "chair," he or she is generally paying for a chunk of cultural quality and predictability. It's implicitly understood that a good deal of the money is going to go to perpetuating Beethoven or Mozart rather than funding new work - and that's merely human nature. You see, regardless of how often artists (and brokers!) chant about the joys of risk-taking, nobody much likes risk. Especially not donors. (And not theatre-goers either; note subscription rates are down.)

And let's be honest - isn't there something a bit intellectually disreputable about demanding bohemian freedoms while clamoring for bourgeois comforts? For some reason free love and a 401(k), much less "stability, salaries and health insurance," have never gone together - and that's because they contradict each other in social terms. Daisey's comparison between actors and migrant workers is even more irritating - is he really so fatuous that he imagines a migrant farm worker and an actor in an urban setting are facing anything like the same economic predicament? (Shades of Pete Hoekstra! And oh for heaven's sake - is that Frédéric Cermeno on the right? Goodness, what's he doing here?)

In short, it's hard to imagine donors contributing to acting "chairs" without a theatre first committing to a stable acting company, and style, and repertory, and succeeding at that remarkable challenge. The trouble is that not only are these expensive propositions to begin with, they're not artistically fashionable (in the New England area, only Trinity Rep approximates this repertory model) - and what's more, they're probably not the kind of theatre Mike Daisey would prefer to see take over the landscape. One can perhaps imagine endowed chairs in Shakespeare or Shaw, I suppose - but can one expect a wealthy donor to endow a confrontational, bohemian vision like the one most contemporary actors affect? Somehow this seems a stretch; indeed, even Harvard, which seems most committed to the academic variant of this vision, seems leery of actually funding a company to support it.

So perhaps the actor's salary problem is actually tied to the deeper cultural problem of both society's perception of theatre and theatre's perception of itself. Maybe Boards and administrators treat actors like chattel because that is unconsciously the role that actors and society have together conspired to create for them: they are dangerous gypsies, harbingers of revolution, etc., etc. - only now do they tell us they'd also like health insurance! Now don't get me wrong, I want actors to have health insurance (and I'm sure Geoffroy Messina, at left, does too!). But I think it's going to take a rather large cultural transformation to make that happen. A transformation which will require a return to the abandoned standards of repertory, a greater emphasis on arts education in the public schools, and even a shift in actors' own attitudes toward theatrical tradition. If administrators work toward all those goals, livable wages for stage actors may become a reality. But they probably cannot be willed into being any other way.

(Note: This may not be the last link in "The Daisy Chain.")

The Daisey chain, Part I

You talkin' ta me? 'Cause I'm Mike Daisey, and I'm the only actor here!
[Correction! Let it be noted that Mike Daisey has made it clear that he IS NOT AN ACTOR. He just takes the place of one in regional theatres.]

A few weeks back the blogs were abuzz with the latest from performer/provocateur Mike Daisey (above, looking his usual meek self), who has been working up a bit of career synergy by arguing vociferously that "theatre has failed America" (which also happens, coincidentally enough, to be the title of his one of his one-man shows). Mr. Daisey even took it upon himself to thoroughly fisk some comments I made about his arguments on Art Hennessey's blog here - as is his wont, without notifying me or allowing the possibility of any response. [Correction! Let it be noted that Mike Daisey DID leave a comment on Art Hennessey's blog regarding his post, which should have been good enough for me, and if not, I should subscribe to Google alerts anyway, and btw, why the hell should Daisey allow comments on his blog, the way Art and everybody else does???]

So of course you know - to quote the great Bugs Bunny - this means war.

I've been dragging my feet on my reply, however, because I kept hoping I might be able to figure a way out of the economic problem Daisey has put his finger on. Because while my impression is that Daisey is an insecure lout, I agree with him that actors aren't paid enough, not nearly. (Although critics are paid even less - I do this for free, Mike.) And the fact that his cries for justice simultaneously operate as a means of self-promotion - for a show that, inevitably, takes paying jobs away from other actors - only means that he's a hypocrite, not that he's wrong.

But I didn't really think of a brilliant new solution to this dilemma - which is an old injustice in free enterprise, by the way, and one that so far has only been ameliorated by collective action. In a word, free markets don't reward the "value" of work, they reward leverage - the highest pay goes to the person with the most power over the product at hand. That power might result from one's position in the supply chain (at the top, or near the end of, the product's distribution is the place to be), or it might result from some special knowledge, or ability, or patent, that only a single person can bring to the table. But when it comes to the work that must be done, but that anyone can do - well, that work is not rewarded, however necessary and valuable it may be. It was only by banding together into unions that rank-and-file workers managed to gain some leverage over their employers. Individually, they were all replaceable - but as a block they were not replaceable. So that was one (partial) way around the leverage-vs.-value problem.

But you can see immediately the problem for actors. They're hardly "rank and file" workers - but in most cases they are, in fact, replaceable. Each actor's particular interpretation of a role is of course unique - but so are those of all the other actors, and the quality of a performance is always open to debate. A solitary actor can gain leverage by becoming famous, and so guaranteeing an audience. But that's the only hope for the individual actor. Thus was Actors' Equity born - and operated generally along the established rules of collective action.

The problem here is that theatre isn't really an industry that can easily accommodate collective action. Indeed, in pure capitalistic terms, theatre isn't a going concern at all - long ago, rents and "wage-price sickness" rendered it an economic invalid.

Why is this so? Because of other economic "laws." Rents for space and equipment (i.e., for theatres) rise with the general tide of a society's productivity. Indeed, many early economists predicted that rents would choke off economic growth - but luckily, improving technology has generally kept us one step ahead of the landlord; that is, via electronics and communications and plain old mechanical tools, we can usually produce a bit more economic output than landlords can grab from us.

Or at least most of us can. Actors, however, can't, because they can only play "live" to roughly the same number of people they played to a hundred years ago. This is one example of what is generally known as "wage-price sickness." Most people (at least until recently, due to globalization) benefitted from their increased technological productivity by receiving higher wages. But again, in the case of theatre, little added productivity can be gleaned from new technology, so the cost of theatre to the consumer must rise proportionately with the actors' paychecks. And because the price of theatre was already skyrocketing because of rising rents, this was very problematic - which meant the actor got squeezed.

Thus outside of major tourist destinations (which can rely on an influx of disposable cash from elsewhere), theatre became a charity case, dependent on donations, and wealthy Boards and their largesse. And clearly this undercuts the power of collective action. Because in a word, it's hard to call a strike against people you're begging for cash from. It is, instead, far easier to seduce them into coughing up bucks for assets they can see and touch, and which will reflect back upon their own glory (like theatres, which, btw, also ameliorate that problem of rising rent). The rich have always been this way, and always will be - they're always parting with ridiculous sums to enhance their own material profile, even while they nickel and dime the help.

So how to get around this roadblock on the path to true equity for actors? I'll ponder that problem (among others) in a follow-up post.

Do MFA programs actually hurt the theatre?

Provocateur Mike Daisey thinks so, and has set off a small Internet rumpus with his initial post on the subject here. A theatre professor (Tom Loughlin of "A Poor Player") responded here and here. The Guardian weighed in here. Daisey snapped back here, where he likens MFA training to "a Ponzi scheme." Okay, actually, it's not really at all like a Ponzi scheme, but I think what Daisey means is that MFA training essentially lures a large number of students into making an investment which will never pay off, but will instead support the salaries of a smaller number of academics. As Daisey puts it:

“If a teacher is teaching in an MFA program that charges a tuition its students can never pay through the craft, the onus is on the teacher to justify for his or herself how this can be ethical.”

And he's quite right that the Poor Player posts didn't actually respond to his arguments at all.

There is, however, at least one response possible, although it's cold comfort to the students involved: MFA programs keep theatre and theatrical traditions alive past the validity of their economic model. In short, students' tuition is sacrificed not merely to the bank accounts of their professors, but to the preservation of the art form. Now there are those who feel art forms simply should not outlive their economic models - it's an interesting moral quandary, though, for those who feel otherwise, whether or not to exploit the finances of students in order to perpetuate, say, large-scale productions of the classics.

But then there's Daisey's other point - that MFA programs actually harm rather than preserve theatre, by forcing those deep in MFA debt from the very profession they trained for! This argument is less easily disposed of, even though it's worth pointing out that the bills for MFAs don't actually affect the theatre audience, which would have to be the prime mover in any theatrical renaissance.

This all reminds me that I never actually finished my series on "What should an academic theatre be?," perhaps because my ideas on the topic keep shifting under different circumstances! But I have to get back to it, and ponder a response (if there is one) to Daisey in the meantime . . .