It would seem, at last, that Mike
Daisey has inherited the mantle of
America’s premier “thematic monologist” from the late Spaulding Grey. In not
much more than half a decade, the works with which he has toured and (perhaps
most impactfully) paused at the Public Theatre to deliver, have turned him into
an icon of the art; and it’s somehow fitting that in his latest “essay,” he
turns his attentions to another icon, the late Apple innovator, in The
Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
At first, Mr, Daisey offers sharply observed (and sharply funny)
social commentary about how Americans, and he and particular, love their
electronic gadgets, which own their owners. There is laughter of rueful
self-recognition as Daisey tells his own tales of each new generation of Apple
technology involving him in a constant game of catch-up, not merely because
each new device is (potentially) so cool, but because each new operating system
eventually forces you to adjust. Jobs had that kind of power.
But
it is also Daisey’s contention that Jobs also had the power, that Apple still
has the power, to drastically affect things
in the Foxconn factory, in the industrial Chinese city of Shenzen, where the
devices are made by hand; and where the hands making them are exploited
workers, functioning under appalling conditions, with no legal or union
protections. Conditions that Daisey learned about from interviews he conducted
with workers, many as young as 16, and witnessed himself on site, during a
three-week visit to the city. Perhaps most sobering is Daisey’s closing
contention that nothing he has revealed has really come as a surprise to his
audience; that all he’s actually done is taken something out of the shadows and
made us look at it in a bright light. This, he asserts, is his version of a
computer-type “virus”; now that it’s introduced into the system, it’s something
we must begin to deal with.
Whether
or not Mr. Daisey can generate enough audience concern for those of us “in the
dark” (as he says) to make our feelings known to Apple in force and
constructively enough to make a difference is impossible to know. But it’s
worth noting that the show has already gotten Apple’s attention. And it’s
worthy of yours as well.
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