Seems that New York theater's wunderkind Mike Daisey got caught having fabricated large parts of his current hit show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. He was caught because This American Life aired an excerpt of the show in January and he, presumably for the first time in his life, got fact checked. And not only was his show found to be filled with lies, he lied to Ira Glass and the TAL producer while they were doing said fact checking. Not just sticking to his claims of his stories being true but also lying about the name of the translator he used while in China and even claiming her phone number no longer worked. An avalanche of lies in a desperate attempt to cover up the original lies. Unfortunately for TAL they aired the excerpt before they discovered they had been duped. But at least they did finally discover the truth and made an immediate move to remedy the situation and offered a retraction.
Before we go any further, a disclosure of my bias when writing about this: I can't stand Mike Daisey. I knew him years ago in Seattle when we were involved in the same theater company, I directed him in one show, assistant directed him in another, and was around when he began his monologue shows. He is the most shameless self-promoter I've ever met in my life, is amazingly self-aggrandizing, and has an ego that outweighs even his 300-something pound frame. (My main reason for turning down his friend request a couple of years ago on Facebook was basically because I knew his sole reason for using Facebook is so he can promote himself rather than actually using it to catch up and stay in touch with old friends.) And his shows, monologues sold as true experiences from his life that has made him very successful and mildly famous, never passed the smell test in my mind.
I have been telling people for a long time that Mike Daisey's shows were bullshit but not too many people seemed to take me seriously. I think there were many who thought I was just jealous of his success but that's not the case. I've never been jealous of impressing wine-spritzer-drinking, upper-middle class white liberals with shallow, pointless shows that they are convinced are the deepest pieces of art they've ever seen. I certainly didn't succeed in my theatre career and eventually moved on from it, but I never wanted what he's got. I would admit that it annoys me that I know so many more talented and more honest writers/performers who have gotten nowhere while he succeeds in selling his drivel as "provocative art" to moneyed theater companies around the country.
But several people I knew in theater from my time in Seattle have stayed fans and friends with Daisey. I don't get it. I suppose there are many people who find his shows witty and entertaining. I never did, but that's just personal taste. People like what they like. The real issue here is credibility and Mike Daisey's lack of it.
Since getting caught in his fabrications he posted a statement on his website. It's fairly short so I'll post the whole thing here.
"This American Life" has raised questions about the adaptation of AGONY/ECSTASY we created for their program. Here is my response:
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.
There are several issues with this statement. First off, really Mike, you're sticking by and claiming to be proud of a show that has been exposed as a fraud? Are you kidding me? And you say allowing your monologue to air on This American Life is your only regret. What about including some of those same falsehoods in an op-ed in the New York Times? Don't you regret that, too? Probably not. The New York Times does, though. They've removed the offending paragraph and posted a statement with the piece on-line. What about all of the TV, radio and print interviews you've done with these personal experience stories as the base of your supposed "expertise" on the subject of workers' rights in China? Fact is, you did a hell of a lot more media appearances than just TAL, things that had nothing to do with using a "dramatic license" and you never once clarified that there were parts of your show that were not true. Your claim that the show has integrity is laughable. You say your ONLY regret was letting TAL run an excerpt of your show, doing your best to make yourself seem naive about this thing called the media - or that you were even aware that TAL is a news show - but don't address the fact you lied out your ass to them during the fact checking process.
The most infuriating part of your statement is the horribly (but typical) self-aggrandizing claim that your show is responsible for sparking a "growing storm of attention and concern" about these issues. Maybe the kind of people who pay $80 to see pretentious theater were completely unaware of the fact that the oppressive regime of China has slave labor conditions in factories that make products we buy but not those of us that actually pay attention to what is going on in the world. This issue has been in the media for a long time. You jumped on a bandwagon. And you did it for less than altruistic reasons.
OK, I'll stop pretending to talk to Mike Daisey now. Thing is, this is typical Mike Daisey moral rationalizing. He got caught in his lies so he plays the theater card, using the catch-all phrase "dramatic license." He tends to redefine his work to whatever is most convenient for him at the time. He calls himself an actor until he wants to separate himself from theater, then he calls himself a monologist. He's denied what he does is theater until he needs it for cover. Early in his career he denied that he was influenced by Spalding Grey, claiming it was his own thing. Later, after Gray committed suicide, Daisey published a tribute to him that went on about Gray's influence on his own work. Not coincidentally I'm sure, he had a show opening about that time.
Mike Daisey will use whatever he can to promote himself and he always has. His "crusade" against Apple and Chinese labor issues is no different. I never bought for a minute that it was about anything but advancing his career and heightening his fame. He couldn't give a shit about Chinese workers.
I can't believe no one, especially producers who paid for it, didn't have more suspicions about this show from the beginning. How could it be that I seem to be the only person who thought his work smelled of garbage? All of it. And this one seemed to have the potential to be the worst one of all. When I first read about The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs the description said that Daisey had asked the Chinese government permission to go to the factories and interview workers but they said no. So he decided to go and do it secretly. A 300+ pound white American in an Asian country with an oppressive regime and we're told that he succeeded in staying under the radar. Really? How is it that anyone bought this shit?
As I suspected, what Daisey basically did was spin a tale based on previously published media reports about conditions in Chinese tech factories and packaged it all as his own personal experiences. He's only admitted to the specific things he got caught lying about (and has now excised them from the show for the remaining performances at the Public Theater while also adding a prologue about this being dramatic piece.") but I, like a lot of people now, find it hard to believe that TAL caught the only lies in the show. Surely there are many, many more. In this show and others. Let's not forget that Daisey has always marketed his shows as memoirs of personal experiences, it is the basis of his entire success.
The Seattle playwright Paul Mullin has posted a lot on his Facebook page about this. We are actually not friends on Facebook but have several mutual friends that have commented on his posts, which is why I saw them. I kind of knew Paul in passing in my Seattle theater days in the 90s but I was in one of his short pieces once and we've had maybe a handful of short conversations. But I do have a lot of respect for him as a theater artist and writer. He made this comment in response to something someone wrote about why Daisy didn't just sell his work as fiction:
"...sadly I think it's as simple as fiction doesn't get Frey to Oprah or Daisey to Ira. And Frey and Daisey damn well know it."
I think he really nailed it with that comment. I know there are people who think Mike Daisey is witty and entertaining regardless of whether or not his shows are true. But I think they're wrong. Daisey's whole aesthetic depends on the audience believing these events really happened to him. Without that his stories are a lot less interesting and nobody knows that more than Mike Daisey. There is a big difference between telling you a story about a guy who got struck by lightning on a road trip or telling you about when I was on this road trip and I got struck by lightning. This is a claim in Mike Daisey's first show. Like most of the material in that show I didn't buy it when I saw it opening night. I didn't even buy most of those stories when I heard them months earlier over drinks at The Frontier Room. He rang false to me from the beginning. If Mike had stuck to stories that happened when he was supposed to be alone this may have never happened to him. He made the mistake of doing it in a situation that could be followed up on. I suppose getting away with it for so long caused an amazing amount of hubris.
Dammit, context matters. If an entire body of work is presented as fact then it should be fact. Not some of it. Not most of it. All of it. And you don't get to change the context after the fact.
Hopefully this will cause a closer look at all his previous work and it is long overdue. I'm not sure what will come of this. It is quite possible that he comes out of it more famous and more in demand. He will certainly do his best, opportunist that he is, to make that the case. Remember folks, Karma isn't real no matter how much we wish it so. But what I hope happens is a complete repudiation of him and his work. No theater should ever produce him again and anyone that has him booked for upcoming shows should cancel just like TAL did for the Chicago performance they were sponsoring.
I'm not sure what The Public theater will do. Their current
public statements of support and the editing of his show to excise the discovered lies may just be an attempt to save face. Maybe after the show closes they will wash their hands of him and publicly acknowledge they never should have produced his work. One can hope. If I ran that company I would demand he return all the money.
It would be nice to see all the media outlets that brought him on their shows and treated him like an expert on the topic of slave-wage labor, like Bill Maher, will offer apologies to their audiences. It does look like at least the New York Times will likely never let him write another op-ed in their paper, though I guess you can't be too sure seeing how they let Ross Douthat bend the truth week after week.
He also released a book based on his show about his three years working at Amazon.com in Seattle. It was sold as a non-fiction title. I imagine there may be someone finally taking a longer look at that, especially over at the Amazon board room.
Maybe there will be even more repercussions on the stolen material front. It is looking like some of the stories that Daisey sold as his own experience were based on information from work done by actual journalist. I'm fairly uneducated in the legal qualifications for something to be plagiarism or copyright infringement but hopefully all the reporters out there who wrote about Foxconn and other Chinese factories are looking at the script for Daisey's show and seeing if they have any case for suing his ass for stealing their intellectual property.
You may be wondering if this matters or if it is that big of a deal. It does and it is. When Mike Daisey made the decision to use oppressed workers' plights for his own personal gain - especially in making false accusations against the factory owners when there were plenty of real ones to use - he hurt the credibility of a worthy movement. There are people on the ground doing real work on this cause and now they may have been tainted by Daisey's credibility problems since he tried to make himself a prominent figure on this issue. Who knows how far their hard work has been set back? Look at how unions in our own country have been easily painted as corrupt organizations run by mobsters because of those who decided to use labor organizations for their own agendas.
One of Mike Daisey's excuses to This American Life after he got caught was that he took shortcuts (his word for his lies) in his "passion to be heard."
This reminded me of Newt Gingrich's reasoning that he committed adultery because he loved his country so much.
And just like Gingrich, the real reason Mike Daisey did it is because he's an despicable narcissist.
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