Mike Daisey

The monologist Mike Daisey’s recent travails have taught him something valuable. His new work, a series of six monologues to be performed, one per month, at Joe’s Pub beginning Monday, will allow him to premiere a piece only when he’s comfortable with it.

“One of the reasons we constructed this series the way we have is it gives me flexibility—if I’m working on a story and it needs time to gestate, it gets that,” Mr. Daisey told the Transom. “In the world of magazines, a long piece can be moved to the next issue. But in the world of theater, they’re so used to working entirely in a world composed only of scripted fiction, and it’s hard to say, ‘You know how you got a description of a show—that’s not what the show is!’”

Mr. Daisey, who answered questions in complete paragraphs, does not work from a script, and his monologues—the first of which in his upcoming series is capacious, including accounts of trips to Zuccotti Park, the Burning Man Festival and Disney World—appeal to an emotional sense of the truth, even as they take some license. This was the issue that led to Mr. Daisey’s temporary fall from grace earlier this year, when an episode of This American Life adapted from his monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was dinged for factual inaccuracies pertaining to a trip to a Foxconn plant in China. He has continued to perform a revised version onstage. “To be honest,” he said, “the bigger problem is trusting yourself—I should make this personal—trusting myself. If you’re good at storytelling, you can control the room. That’s what makes it such a seductive medium. It’s a rigorous responsibility to control that gift. It’s difficult to face up to where you fell short. You must not abuse your gift. I went back into theaters. It was really clear to me I could get that authority back. The problem is not, will people give me authority back—when you’re a professional storyteller in world where there are not many oral storytellers, the biggest problem is yourself.”

In Mr. Daisey’s telling, his relationship with his audience has not been affected by the controversy. “In the room, it’s the same. Outside the room, in the media, it still feels stormy and tempestuous ... It didn’t only make me think about consequences of facts and what happens when people are factually true and what different degrees of truth are. It made me think about the value of imagination, and the value of not shortchanging that as well.

“Now that I’m on the other side of it, I’m a better artist. I’d be hard-pressed to roll time back,” he said.

His new work places him, as with his journey to Foxconn and other past pieces, in unexpected locales; Mr. Daisey said he never expected to go to Occupy Wall Street, for instance. “My work has a strong political component, but in my lifetime, I haven’t been an active activist. I have no history of protests. In each of these arenas, I came as an outsider.”

As an outsider, Mr. Daisey has been able to ensure that his reactions to what he sees are genuine through a simple trick. Whether traveling to Disney, Zuccotti or the Black Rock Desert, “if something happens while I am somewhere, and I find myself consciously thinking, this would be a good story, I forbid myself from using that. If you really stick to it, you can send a message back to your subconscious—so I don’t have that thought anymore. I’m actually able to have an authentic experience, and be present. I found it very helpful, if not for the creation of art, then for the living of a normal life.”

Tina Brown (Photo: BeastTV)

Newsbeast editor in chief Tina Brown seems to have developed a redemptive streak, at least when it comes to the bad boys and girls of the media world. Her website has recently published several pieces by otherwise disgraced journalists.

On Friday, Ms. Brown brought in Mike Daisey to pen a piece on the first anniversary of the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs. You may remember Mr. Daisey as the man who forced the public radio show This American Life to air an extensive mea culpa after he adapted his one-man show about the brutal conditions at Chinese factories that make Apple products for its broadcast, and it was later found to contain, as the subsequent retraction put it, “numerous fabrications.” Though Mr. Daisey included untruths in his story and, in the words of the radio show's team, “misled This American Life during the fact-checking process,” The Daily Beast apparently had no problem giving him over 1,000 words and two accompanying four-minute “BeastTV” videos, in which he “reflects on the last year” in which he “fell from grace” and acknowledges that mistakes were made, but nonetheless credits himself with sparking a wider discussion of Apple’s labor practices.

Mr. Daisey isn’t the only fabulist who has contributed to The Daily Beast in the past few months. In late July, the site brought in disgraced former Timesman Jayson Blair to weigh in after The New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer was busted for making up Bob Dylan quotes in his best-selling pop science book, Imagine: How Creativity Works.

“Nine years ago, I was Jonah Lehrer,” Mr. Blair wrote. That sentence may be the most accurate thing Mr. Blair’s ever written, and it’s why he’s blacklisted throughout the journalism word, except apparently at the Beast, where it increasingly looks like Ms. Brown is running some sort of media rehab facility.

Indeed, just one day before Mr. Blair’s piece ran, Joan Juliet Buck took to the Beast to tell “her side of the story” about a widely reviled puff piece profiling the wife of brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad that she wrote for Vogue in February 2011. Ms. Buck’s story praised Mrs. Assad as “wildly democratic” and “glamorous, young and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies.” The story provoked instantaneous ridicule and was eventually scrubbed from Vogue’s website.

The Daily Beast didn’t include an explanation for why it allowed Ms. Buck to make the improbable claim that she “didn’t know” Mr. Assad was “a murderer” when she started working on her story. However, based on the growing rogue’s gallery accumulating bylines at the site, it seems that ethical questions won’t stop the benevolent editor-confessor from opening her pages to the fallen. But not all good deeds go punished, and giving a new platform to wayward scribes may be a speedy route to page-views—if not to critical acclaim. For example, the piece by Ms. Buck was criticized by many other websites, which of course linked to it in conjunction with their critiques.

We reached out to Ms. Brown to ask about her decision to publish these journalistic miscreants and whether we might expect more blighted Beast bylines in the future. As of this writing, she has yet to respond. We imagine she’s probably busy trying to get in touch with Mr. Lehrer.

Update (10/10/12 11:42 a.m.): An earlier version of this story described This American life as an NPR show. It is distributed to public radio stations by PRI, not NPR. 

Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti in 'Once.' (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Before reckoning with the new, exceedingly lovely, and disappointingly thin Broadway musical Once, which opened Sunday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, let us first discuss what might be called the War Horse Insufficiency.

The symptoms of this malady are stunning stagecraft and a lack of compelling story or emotional richness, a visual display so creative and impressive that the theatergoer wants to believe the play or musical he’s seeing to be great, but with a book insufficient to live up to the production. War Horse, the British story of a boy and his beloved horse at the Vivian Beaumont, is its most prominent current example: gorgeous design, breathtaking puppetry, insipid story.

Once, which offers pretty, tuneful indie-folk songs, nontraditional, dynamic staging and choreography, and a series of smart, witty directorial flourishes, alas suffers from the War Horse Insufficiency. Everything about it is lovely; nothing about it is moving.

The story of two mildly depressed musicians in Dublin whose lives are changed by a weeklong romance, Once began its life as a 2006 Irish independent film that became a sleeper hit and won the Oscar for Best Original Song. Transformed into a stage musical by the director John Tiffany and choreographer Steven Hoggett, it was an off-Broadway success at New York Theater Workshop in the fall, leading to its current Broadway engagement.

Messrs. Tiffany and Hoggett are the team behind Black Watch, the fascinating and stunning  retelling of the history of a Scottish army regiment disbanded in 2006 after hundreds of years of history and recent service in the Iraq war. (Mr. Hoggett has also choreographed the angst-ridden pop-punk musical American Idiot and the gleefully silly Peter and the Starcatcher.) When it came to St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2007, Black Watch was a powerful production, both as a document of the war’s impact on the men fighting it and as a piece of stagecraft, integrating live action and video projections with highly choreographed movements that propelled their story forward.

In Once, Messrs. Tiffany and Hoggett again use innovative and interesting movement to help tell their story, and they do it on a welcoming Irish publike set by Bob Crowley that serves with little embellishment as the various settings of the play—a musical-instrument store, a vacuum-repair shop and so on. The actors in the play are also its musicians, and they sit with their instruments along the sides of the pub set when they’re not in a scene. As the audience enters, these musicians are jamming on stage; during intermission, audience members are invited to cross the footlights and order drinks from what is transformed into a real bar. The effect is to render the play, somewhat magically, as a tale told among friends over drinks, something that happened once.

It’s acted and sung by a splendid cast led by Steve Kazee as the Guy, as he’s called in the cast of characters, a sad, brooding, guitar-slinging songwriter living with his father above the family shop and left heartbroken by a girl who’s moved to New York, and Cristin Milioti as the Girl, serious and also sad, a Czech immigrant with a young daughter, an estranged husband and an abiding love of the piano. Individually, together or backed by supporting players from the group, they sound terrific singing and playing the songs written by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who starred in the initial film.

But for all these lovely performance elements, Once doesn’t succeed in elevating itself from an interesting evening into an engaging one. Its book, adapted by Enda Walsh from John Carney’s screenplay, never succeeds in making either of its protagonists human or compelling, in making you care about them. The Guy is a passive cipher, the Girl a collection of quirks. This makes their affair an intellectual exercise, rather than a passionate pairing. For the audience, there is no connection, no engagement.

It’s pretty to watch, but, for a romance, insufficient.

“At least twice during his new show, the virtuoso monologist Mike Daisey refers to himself as an actor. Twice more, he calls himself a storyteller. He is of course both things, but the descriptors miss the true impact of what he has accomplished in his powerful piece The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which opened Monday night at the Public Theater. As much as he is a performer, Mr. Daisey is also an investigative journalist, even, in the best sense, a muckraker.” —The Observer, reviewing that show, Oct. 24, 2011.

“I stand by my work … What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.” —Mike Daisey, posting to his blog, March 16, 2012.

Mike Daisey’s reputation was destroyed last weekend. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, meted out the destruction, but the real work of it was done by Mr. Daisey himself. Through hundreds or thousands of performances over the past several years, he has presented as fact his The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, purportedly an honest recounting of his visits to the factories in Shenzhen, China, where Apple products are made. “Tonight,” he would say near the end of his monologue, “we know the truth.”

But, it turned out, we didn’t. A China-based reporter for public radio’s Marketplace, rereporting a version of the monologue that aired in January on This American Life, revealed numerous falsehoods in Mr. Daisey’s story. The most troubling were the creations: people he claimed he’d met—a man disabled making iPads who’d never seen one in use until Mr. Daisey swiped on his own, a group of preteen workers—who didn’t actually exist but made for compelling moments in his performance.

As someone who was snookered, I’m angry about the snookering. But more than that, I’m angry about the damage Mr. Daisey has done to himself. I’m not convinced, as some commentators have argued, that what he says on stage need be as rigorously accurate as what appears in The Times. But I do believe that if it’s not, he may not actively present himself as a lone truth-teller, as he did. And I further believe that he cannot actively conspire to hide his evasions, as he did in misrepresenting himself to This American Life’s producers.

Now apologetic for those fact-checking lies but still defiant about his theatrical work, Mr. Daisey continues to insist that his factual manipulations are less important than the larger points he is persuasively conveying. He seems unaware that he has in fact hurt that greater cause, by allowing his opponents to dismiss his work, and that he’s damaging not only his own credibility but that of advocacy theater.

editorial@observer.com

Daisey, performing "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs"

PRI's This American Life has retracted its most popular broadcast ever, "Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory," because it contains "significant fabrications," host and executive producer Ira Glass announced today. An excerpt of Mike Daisey's one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, it has been downloaded 888,000 times and streamed another 206,000.

Mr. Daisey said he regretted allowing his one-man show--a combination of "fact, memoir, and dramatic license" --to be billed as journalism.

"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," he wrote.

In the play, Mr. Daisey talks about visiting the FoxConn iPhone and iPad factory in Shenzen, China. Upon hearing the segment, Marketplace China correspondent Rob Schmitz, who had already done quite a bit of reporting on Apple's supply chain, doubted the veracity of Mr. Dasiey's experiences. Mr. Schmitz tracked down Mr. Daisey's interpreter in Shenzen, and she disputed much of the material in the play.

The fabrications include one of its most dramatic moments, involving an injured factory worker operating an iPad for the first time (Mr. Daisey's iPad) with his mangled hand, and the allegation that he met many underage factory workers. (That one also snuck by this paper.)

"Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast," Mr. Glass wrote. "That doesn't excuse the fact that we never should've put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake."

When This American Life fact-checkers asked for his interpreter's contact information, Mr. Daisey said her cell phone number no longer worked and he had no way of reaching her.

"At that point, we should've killed the story," Mr. Glass said. "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."

This American Life has dedicated this weekend's program to correcting the errors in the piece, including interviews with Mr. Schmitz, Mr. Daisey and his interpreter, Cathy Lee. Which actually sounds kind of like your typical, things-are-never-what-they-seem This American Life tale of ambition, human fallibility, and the vagaries of truth and art. The show's home station, WBEZ Chicago, has also cancelled Mr. Daisey's live performance at the Chicago Theatre on April 7 and is refunding tickets.

Mr. Daisey responded on his blog, in the style of John D'Agata in The Lifespan of a Fact:

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.

And the show must go on, according to Cult of Mac, which got this statement of support from The Public Theater, where Agony is currently running.

In the theater, our job is to create fictions that reveal truth — that’s what a storyteller does, that’s what a dramatist does. THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS reveals, as Mike’s other monologues have, human truths in story form.

In this work, Mike uses a story to frame and lead debate about an important issue in a deeply compelling way. He has illuminated how our actions affect people half-a-world away and, in doing so, has spurred action to address a troubling situation. This is a powerful work of art and exactly the kind of storytelling that The Public Theater has supported, and will continue to support in the future.

Mike is an artist, not a journalist. Nevertheless, we wish he had been more precise with us and our audiences about what was and wasn’t his personal experience in the piece.

Update: An earlier version of this post said NPR's This American Life, it's in fact PRI's.

Mike Daisey in "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." (Photo by Joan Marcus / Public Theater)

At least twice during his new show, the virtuoso monologist Mike Daisey refers to himself as an actor. Twice more, he calls himself a storyteller. He is of course both things, but the descriptors miss the true impact of what he has accomplished in his powerful piece, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which opened Monday night at the Public Theater.

As much as he is a performer, Mr. Daisey is also an investigative journalist, even, in the best sense, a muckraker. In his forthright examination of Mr. Jobs, of the various i-devices Jobs created, and of the Chinese sweatshops where those devices are manufactured, Mr. Daisey opens an Upton Sinclair-like window into the horrors and human cost of producing the shiny electronic gizmos resting silently, and increasingly uncomfortably, in our pockets.

For this show, Mr. Daisey is seated, per usual, at a lone chair behind a solitary table set at the middle of an open, mostly unadorned stage. (He is directed here, also per usual, by Jean-Michele Gregory, his wife.) In a nod to the topic, the table is not the standard dark wood; instead it’s a sleekly simple glass-topped, metal-legged Parsons design; planted behind it, Mr. Daisey—enormous, black-clad, sweaty, with arms dancing, fingers twitching, fleshly face contorting expressively—is totally compelling, especially as he digs deeper into his story.

A lifelong Apple devotee, Mr. Daisey was inspired by an item on a website covering the company and its products—someone’s iPhone had arrived with photos already stored on it, test shots taken at a Chinese factory—to visit the place where they’re made. It’s a factory in Shenzhen, a Deng Xiaoping-designated “special economic zone,” in which Western companies can build enormous factories with virtually no regulation of environmental effects or worker treatment. Mr. Daisey’s account of his visits to Shenzhen—where the polluted air hits you “like a booted foot on your chest,” he says, and where “the cost of labor is basically nothing”—is the meat of the piece, the revelation in his reporting.

Robotics don’t manufacture these devices; people do—workers as young as 12, working up to 16 hours each day, sleeping in factory-provided dormitories, a dozen or so per small room. The Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, which makes an astonishing 52 percent of all electronic devices in the world, Daisey reports, including Apple’s, employs some 430,000 people. Each of them performs his or her assigned, small task over and over. Mr. Daisey waited outside the factory to meet them, and he tells of one woman who spends all day, every day, wiping iPhone screens. Another man’s hand was crushed in a metal press making iPads; he received no medical attention. During Mr. Daisey’s visit, another worker died on the line after a working a 30-hour shift. It’s Modern Times, sans Chaplin; the Ford assembly line, without the $5 per day—or the UAW.

What elevates the impressive feat of journalism into such a gripping performance is the same thing that turns a simple newspaper report into a great magazine piece: Mr. Daisey expertly constructs his story. He opens with an attention-grabbing scene: him in Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions, a sort of black-market shopping mall, bonding with a gold-toothed phone-hacking over an ersatz iPhone. He then shifts to a warm account of his own fraught obsession with Apple. He weaves in the history of the company and of Jobs, tracking the CEO’s transition from “techno-liberatarian hippie” to “megalomaniacal asshole and kind of a tyrant.” And he layers in his own gonzo reporting among the workers of Shenzhen. He acknowledges Jobs’ recent death, but uses that news to underline his points, not as a reason to pull punches.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is a perfectly assembled, vividly performed act of advocacy journalism. It ends on a provocative point: Mr. Jobs could have changed manufacturing, could have used Apple’s power and his own charisma to demand better working conditions for the people making his products, but he chose not to. Now that we in the audience know the truth—that our phones and computers are made by overworked child laborers, virtual serfs—what will we choose?

You could take it as an indictment of our apathetic, consumerist society that the most urgent advocacy play to open in the last week was the one about Steve Jobs, not the one about Martin Luther King. You could blame that on America’s endemic historical amnesia, or on the vogueish but false idea that we’re in a post-race, post-rights era.

Or it could be because of the mediocre playwriting, limp direction, and mismatched performances in The Mountaintop, the starry, high-profile imagining of King’s final night that opened Thursday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.

The Mountaintop dramatizes an invented interaction between King and a young chambermaid in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, on the balcony outside of which, as we well know, he’ll be assassinated the next evening. A hit in London with different actors and a different director, it was written by a buzzed-about young playwright, Katori Hall; it features the movie stars Samuel L. Jackson as King and Angela Bassett as the maid, Camae; it won the Olivier award for best new play. It is intriguingly determined to show us King as a flesh-and-bones man—he relieves himself, not visibly but quite audibly, soon after entering the motel room—while also placing him in a near-deified pantheon.

It doesn’t succeed, primarily because it doesn’t actually have anything new to say about the civil-rights hero. The first few moments of the play seem promising—it’s great fun watching King putter about the room, writing and rehearsing bits of oratory. But after Camae enters, their flirtatious conversation is a bore: We’re told lots of things we already know about the reverend, including the fact that he had an eye for women who were not his wife.

Mr. Jackson gives a relaxed, subtly electric performance as King, lending to the role his natural presence and magnetism. But director Kenny Leon, who drew a gorgeously matched set of performances from Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in his searing revival of August Wilson’s Fences two seasons ago, is unable to rein in the grandstanding Ms. Bassett, who seems poised to chew up Mr. Jackson along with the meticulously replicated scenery. Her performance becomes less jarring once The Mountaintop makes a surprise turn for the surreal and metaphysical near the two-thirds mark, but even then, it, and the play, remain unconvincing.

Of course, the material doesn’t help Ms. Bassett control herself. Her character ends the play bellowing a litany of civil-rights names and milestones reached after King’s death. It’s a Black History Month version of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and there’s no subtle way to play that.

editorial@observer.com

There's only one problem with this carefully marketed plan: Race, Mr. Mamet's sure-to-be-great new play, isn't great at all. It's not even very good.

The curtain comes up at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where Race opened Sunday night, on a stylized Santo Loquasto set of a looming book-filled law-firm library, plopped like a diorama—this is an educational lesson, after all—in the center of an otherwise bare all-black and starkly lit stage. Four actors—two middle-aged white men, one middle-aged black man and a younger black woman—are in that conference room, awkwardly already in mid-conversation. (Mr. Mamet directs his play, yielding pacing and placement often as stilted and abrupt as his famous dialogue.)

The well-known and powerful billionaire Charles Strickland (misplayed by Richard Thomas, who never seems either powerfully angry or powerfully dismissive) is in the lawyers' office, attempting to hire them. He has been accused of raping a young black woman in a hotel room, which he denies. Jack Lawson (an excellent James Spader, who it could be argued has been training his whole career for this role) is the cynical and brilliant litigator he wants to represent him, and Henry Brown (David Alan Grier) is Lawson's black law partner, which makes this firm a good choice for Strickland, considering the accusation. Susan (Kerry Washington) is a young black associate at the firm, the novice to whom Lawson can pontificate—and to whom Mr. Mamet can make his arguments. It is she who, as the wobbly third leg of the firm, will be the center of Mr. Mamet's usual swirl of possible treachery and double-crossing.

The first act has Lawson and Brown discussing whether they want to take Strickland's case, and, with Susan, whether they think he's innocent or guilty. (Don't lawyers specifically not do that?) This provides Mr. Mamet the opportunity to put in his characters' mouths—especially Lawson's—his theories about guilt and innocence, truth and perception, back and white. All black people hate all white people, all white people are guilty; everyone feels all sorts of guilt and shame, truth is flexible and a smart lawyer's skill is to manipulate all that.

It's all rendered with Mr. Mamet's expected verbal pyrotechnics, but the inherent pleasure of virtuosity aside, the fireworks fall flat. The play is reveling in its subversive political incorrectness, but political incorrectness hasn't seemed flamboyantly subversive at any point in this new century.

In the second act (the roughly 90-minute play includes what the Playbill notes is a 12-minute intermission), things make less sense. When it turns out Strickland's accuser is a prostitute, Lawson announces he won't reveal that fact to the jury. (Huh?) When it appears that associate Susan has sold out the defense's strategy to prosecutors, Lawson's partner, Brown, reminds us that he never liked her, pulling her college thesis from his desk drawer (conveniently handy!) and announcing its title, "Structural Survivals of Racism in Supposedly Bias-free Transactions" (conveniently suspicious!).

When word comes that the hotel maid has amended her testimony to police, undermining Lawson's planned defense, we're to understand that it's a false statement, proof that the prosecution is onto his strategy. But when word comes that the responding police officer has found a lost page of his report, also undermining the defense, this revelation is presented as an honestly lost-and-found document (confusing!).

Race is an intriguing play, and far better than Mr. Mamet's last Broadway effort, the mediocre sitcom November. (It's also much better than "Keep Your Pantheon," the main piece of The Two Unrelated Plays By David Mamet, which played at the Atlantic earlier this season.) Ultimately, this is not thought-provoking Mamet so much as a parody of it.

IN THE LAST CARGO CULT, MIKE DAISEY'S most recent monologue, which opened Monday night at the Public, Mr. Daisey talks about traveling to the small, primitive South Pacific island of Tanna to visit a culture almost entirely different from our own, one of communal living, with no private property and—more important—no money. He's going there to witness John Frum Day, an annual religious celebration of the island's John Frum's cargo cult, a religion based on Tanna's brief exposure to American servicemen during World War II. On John Frum Day, the people of Tanna celebrate by recounting U.S. history—or at least their version of it—in song, dance and theater.

Mr. Daisey is a funny, insightful, magnetic storyteller, and his travelogue—tales of flying to Tanna on a ramshackle plane, eating local delicacies, sleeping with a baby pig—are hilarious. They're also not really the point. Mr. Daisey is concerned with money, how Tanna survives without it and how much we rely on it. He's angry about the financial crisis; he's angry at the bankers who created it; and he's particularly angry to realize that the financial system has us all interconnected, that he can't revel in the bankers' misfortune because what's bad for them is bad for him, too.

He weaves several stories together—of the Tanna trip; of arriving at college and first being exposed to rich people; of all the "awesome stuff" in the world he wants and which require cash—to make us think about the role of money.

And you do think about it, for the time you're in the theater. Thinking about money is like thinking about air; you don't need to, because it's everywhere. More likely, what you will thinkk about Cargo Cult after you walk out of the theater is what a pleasure your last two hours have been.

TO SEE SO HELP ME GOD!, A LONG-LOST and very funny 1929 backstage comedy being presented by the Mint Theater Company at the Lucille Lortel, is to wonder why this one was forgotten while so many boring old backstage comedies—The Royal Family, currently at the Manhattan Theatre Club, for example—were remembered.

So Help Me God! is a witty and goofily screwball old-fashioned three-acter written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who a few years earlier had written the play Chicago. (The Kander and Ebb musical arrived a half-century later.) It was set for an October 1929 opening, but the Great Depression interfered. This production, with a script adapted by Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank, who also directed, is essentially its premiere.

It's an All About Eve story, but one in which Eve is outflanked by Margo. Kristen Johnston is fantastic as Lily Darnley, the domineering diva, a 6-foot-tall force of nature in dramatic deco gowns (the costumes, I should disclose, are by my friend Clint Ramos) who casually molds people and situations and the plot of the play-within-a-play to fit her needs. My Girl star Anna Chlumsky is less strong in the Eve part, flat and insufficiently steely as she plots her rise. But the rest of the cast ably supports, especially Catherine Curtain as Belle, the blowsy broad in the company, and Jeremy Lawrence as the put-upon stage manager.

The characters are deadly serious in their backstage machinations, but, for us, it's a fun (if slight) night at the theater.

MELISSA JAMES GIBSON'S THIS, WHICH OPENED at Playwrights Horizons last week, is poorly named but impressively written, a smart, funny and affecting play about four old friends (and one sexy new addition to the group) who wrestle with changing lives as they grow up and, as people do, grow both together and apart.

Jane (Julianne Nicholson), Marrell (Eisa Davis) and Alan (Glenn Fitzgerald) were classmates at an unnamed but elite school; they've remained tight for 15 years. Tom (Darren Pettie) was a staffer at the college; he's married to Marrell and together they have a newborn son who won't sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time. Jane has a daughter, too, and a husband who died a year earlier; Alan is gay and single and wittily self-lacerating. Finally, there's a Jean-Pierre (Louis Cancelmi), a handsome French doctor-without-borders ("I always think that makes it sound like he has a messy personal life," Alan snarks), who becomes enmeshed with the group as Marrell tries to fix him up with Jane.

Marrell and Tom are drifting apart, their distance exacerbated by the stress of young parenthood. Jane is exhausted by the world's sympathy and pity, and by the idea she had an ideal marriage until her husband got sick. Alan is lonely and bored and desperate to do something useful in the world. Jane and Tom fall into a brief affair. Tom doesn't want Marrell to know because he can't deal with the repercussions; Jane doesn't want Marrell to know because she can't stand to hurt her. There are kinds of unhappiness, Marrell tells Jane at one point, "personal, marital, professional, existential or interdisciplinary." Her own, she continues, is interdisciplinary. All of their unhappiness is interdisciplinary.

The unhappiness is also honest, and real, recognizable to us all if not in specifics then at least in spirit, intelligently rendered in sharp and wise dialogue. Together with another Playwrights production, Circle Mirror Transformation—which after being twice extended in the fall returns to Playwrights' upstairs space, the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, next week—it's one of the best new dramas of the season.

THE NEW A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, which opened at the BAM Harvey Theater last week, is every bit as good as you've heard. What more is there to say? It's the classic and powerful Tennessee Williams play; Cate Blanchett gives a mesmerizing performance as the delusional faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois, and Joel Edgerton is hunky and duly animal (if, sometimes, a bit too Brando-sounding) as Stanley. The Liv Ullman-directed production, originally staged at the Sydney Theatre Company, is only here through Dec. If you can still find a ticket, go.

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There’ve been lots of Frank Zappa cover bands over the years, but none, presumably, as faithful to Frank’s strange muse as Zappa Plays Zappa—the project led by his son, Dweezil. After squirreling himself away to study Frank’s more than 80 albums in chronological order for two years, the guitarist emerged in 2006 to recruit musicians capable of capturing Frank’s bizarre—and dizzyingly technical—genius. (If you can’t speak personally to the wonders of a tune like “Peaches En Regalia,” we’re sure you have an uncle who will gladly testify.) Not only does Dweezil star in ZPZ, so too does long-time Zappa collaborator Ray White. The eight-piece band is in the middle of a three-night engagement at the Blender Theater at Gramercy. Friday’s show is sold out, though tickets for tonight’s performance are still available. [Tickets on sale now]

THEATER

Back in 2001, Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot received three Oscar nominations, including best supporting actress (for Julie Walters) and best director. The film focused on a young Brit whose love for ballet helped him rise above his working class roots and the miners’ strikes shaking Northern England in the mid-1980s. Seven years later, the movie has been turned into a musical at the Imperial Theater featuring many of the same talent—there’s Daldry as the director, as well as choreographer Peter Darling and lyricist Lee Hall. Though Daldry has no intention of recreating the film, despite its success. “We only decided to go ahead with the musical because we felt we could make it better than the film,” he told the Times. “I feel like it lives much more happily on the stage than on the screen.” Plus he managed to snag the services of Sir Elton John to write the music. Nice. “Billy Elliot" is currently in previews, and opens on November 13. [Tickets on sale now]

And finally, “If You See Something Say Something” opened at the Public Theater at Joe’s Pub on Monday. Riffing off the hated MTA slogan, Mike Daisey’s monologue constructs a super-critical history of America’s national security structure running from the creation of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico to today’s bloated Department of Homeland Security. All in all, a timely, though not entirely pleasant, reminder of our president's failed administration. Here’s to the next one! [Tickets on sale now]     

And it pays off, apparently. Mr. Daisey’s How Theater Failed America has now moved from Joe’s Pub to the Barrow Street Theatre downtown, and judging by the enthusiastic response he received on a recent Saturday night, a lot of people are enjoying hearing him tell us how badly theater is doing.

He isn’t a happy critic, though; he’s a furious and sentimental one. He forgives theater for humiliating him (and all actors). Anyone who quotes H. L. Mencken in his program notes is the performer for me: “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

MR. DAISY WADDLES onstage dressed in black, and mops his brow with a black handkerchief as he sits ranting and shrieking and shvitzing at that cut-price altar of all theater monologuists—a desk with a glass of water. A short, self-described fat man of 35, Mr. Daisey bears a striking resemblance to Terry Teachout, a drama critic at The Wall Street Journal. But he’s a better critic than Mr. Teachout. He not only criticizes theater with the knowledge of a long-suffering insider, but he’s also scrupulously self-critical.

His opening words are very modest. “You should not have come here,” he announces balefully. “You already know this story.” That takes some chutzpah—but no more, as Alexis Soloski informs us wittily in The Village Voice, than the pronouncement of Sophocles’ Oedipus: “I have known the story before you told it all too well.”

“No, seriously, why did you come?” Mr. Daisey asks us sweetly. I often think that at the theater, too, though not quite so soon as Mr. Daisey does here. He even describes the title of his show as “dreadful.” That really surprised me. I’d gone to see How Theater Failed America because of the title.

Happily, Mr. Daisey soon had me laughing and involved in his story. Opening-night cast parties have gigantic amounts of cheese, he tells us, and the habitually impoverished actors hoard it. “We work for cheese!” he protests incredulously.

There’s no humiliation the actor does not endure. Actors are “professionals,” Mr. Daisey tells us edgily. “We obey.” It was how he found himself jerking off onstage in Kabuki makeup while playing the bishop in Jean Genet’s The Balcony. He was dutifully following the “vision” of his lunatic director.

His insider take on the lost soul of regional theater is telling: He rails, among much else, against “the freeze-dried actors” flown in from New York (though the repertory theaters in his native Seattle might disagree), and the elderly audiences. (“I hear the oxygen tanks hissing in the dark!”) He’ll hear no argument from me about his critique of the nation’s major nonprofit institutions, whose main theaters perpetuate safe fare and revivals at the cost of any risk and new writing.

“You see this black box,” he reports one major artistic director telling him guiltily. “That’s for you!”

Mr. Daisey names no names in How Theater Failed America—doubtless because he would like to work again. It nevertheless blunts his case against. Nor are his more sweeping arguments always convincing; they can be soupy and shrill (and he proposes no answers). His Oprah-like confessional detour to a serious battle with depression and an early suicide attempt chilled the audience.

It was theater that saved his life: A chance offer, another nutty challenge, held out hope and purpose for him in the wilderness, and it led to his decision to try his luck as a writer and performer. It’s been no picnic. But the American theater, I’m glad to say, did not fail Mr. Daisey.

A RECENT NEW musical, Glory Days, about four college freshmen returning nostalgically to their high school, closed on Broadway after its opening night. I didn’t review it principally because its novice composers from out of town—who are in their early 20s—had surely been criticized enough. If anyone was to blame for Glory Days, it was its opportunistic producers who brought it to Broadway.

The new musical Saved at Playwrights Horizons might have a different fate in store, but it’s not at all for me, and probably not for Mr. Daisey, either. It’s exactly what our nonprofit theaters should not be doing.

Produced with “enhancement money” from the for-profit production company Elephant Eye Theatrical, Saved has a blatant, bleary eye on a Broadway transfer. Based on the 2004 movie of the same name—a dud starring Mandy Moore—it’s meant to be a spoof of religious hypocrisy at an evangelical Christian school.

A virginal student becomes pregnant when she sleeps with her worried, handsome school friend in a forlorn attempt to prove to him that he isn’t gay. (Jesus, appearing to her in a vision, told her to do it, and all follows from that.) It’s meant to be fun, and perhaps an affectionate renegade like John Waters could have made it work. But this is a witless, sniggering production that can have a Jewish girl speaking in tongues for a cheap laugh. (She’s actually saying, “I have a hot pussy.”)

Directed by Gary Griffin, the miserable show has a threadbare set that looks like an anonymous hotel lobby with colored lights. (It’s designed by the usually excellent Scott Pask.) The lights flicker whenever a cell phone rings. The bland music and lyrics by the experienced and admired downtown artist Michael Friedman manage to sound more or less the same. (The book and additional lyrics are by Rinne Groff.) And a number of cast members, I regret to say, are about a decade too mature for their roles as frolicsome teens.

It’s always good to see a performer as fine and honest as John Dossett (he makes even the clichéd adult role of Pastor Skip appear dignified), and the appealing Julia Murney, who plays Lillian (the mom),
reminds us that she’s been seen far too little in musicals of late.

Let be, as old Hamlet says.

Enhancement money is nothing new in nonprofit theater nowadays. But the awesomely misguided Saved is reason enough for Playwrights Horizons to resist its allure.

jheilpern@observer.com