Benjamin Barlow
Actor Jason Compton performs Mike Daisey’s monologue.
Create an event on your iPhone calendar app and set a reminder, so you don’t miss an intimate and provocative solo performance about Apple and its founder, presented by Left of Left Center.
In The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which plays Aug. 31-Sept. 2 at the Bartell Theatre, the small and predictably liberal-leaning Madison company has something to say about the outsized role technology plays in our lives and the responsibility of consumers to demand that global corporations operate in ethical ways. The evening may also provide some interesting perspective on Foxconn’s business practices in China, a topic of local interest given Gov. Walker’s proposed $3 billion deal to bring manufacturing jobs to the Badger state.
But in an era of rogue websites and “fake news,” this production serves as a reminder that theater is not the same as journalism. The monologue was written by Mike Daisey, whose accounts of visits to China’s Foxconn factories have been, in part, debunked.
The play, which detailed the horrendous conditions in these factories that manufacture parts for the Apple empire, debuted at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C., in 2010. Over the next two years, Daisey performed it 200 times, in 18 different cities to great acclaim. New York Times critic Charles Isherwood wrote, “Anyone with a cellphone and a moral center should see this show.”
In January 2012, This American Life devoted an entire radio show to Daisey and the stories he had purportedly unearthed on his trips to China — tales of underage workers pulling back-to-back, 12-hour shifts and working with dangerous neurotoxins while armed security guards patrolled the factory gates. The storyteller had enjoyed moderate success with previous monologues. But his turn on This American Life made him instantly famous.
Until he was infamous.
Skeptics questioned details in Daisey’s account of his research trips, and producer/host Ira Glass and his team tracked down the Chinese interpreter who had accompanied Daisey on his visits to Foxconn. After she contradicted much of what Daisey had told interviewers, This American Life aired a retraction of the entire episode about The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs — a theater piece that had been marketed as entirely true.
Since that time, the script has been edited. Gone are the stories that Daisey fabricated completely: talking with 12- and 13-year-old girls who work at Foxconn, seeing workers poisoned by N-Hexane with hands that shake so terribly they can’t hold a glass of water. Daisey also never saw the workers’ dorms, or the guards with guns. He lied.
In his half-hearted on-air apology to Ira Glass, Daisey said “Look. I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. 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.”
Now Daisey performs an altered version, and invites others to use the script in any way they wish. For local director Jake Penner and actor Jason Compton, who performs the monologue, this was the perfect time to revisit the play. “Obviously we need to acknowledge the controversy surrounding the piece,” says Penner. “We need to make a distinction between theater and fact. But given the possibility that Foxconn could actually be coming to Wisconsin, we also both felt the urgency to do the project now.”
Penner says he and Compton have spent a great deal of time thinking about the right “frame” for the play, looking at clips of other productions and figuring out how to make the script speak to audiences in this place and time. The emphasis of the bare-bones performance will be the story itself, which regardless of its veracity, is compelling.
“For me the play is about the real cost of the luxuries we have in our lives, like our iPhones,” says Penner, “I think it’s worth asking questions about how dependent we are on the latest shiny computer gadget and if we have a moral imperative to tell companies that we’re willing to pay a little bit more for the next iPhone upgrade, if it means workers in other countries can earn a fair wage and work in decent conditions.”
Penner thinks that people will enjoy the show and that it will make them think: “It’s my hope that they’re also going to have a lot to say about it afterwards.”