Please Let the Daisey Debacle Mean More Theatre/Journalism, not Less.

A lot has already been said about the revelation that Mike Daisey fabricated many portions of his one-man show, The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs: a piece he previously passed off as entirely truthful reportage, most egregiously on This American Life, a nationally broadcast public radio program. I leave it to wiser minds to sort through all but one of the many questions Mike’s transgressions raise, reserving for scrutiny only that which I feel I am particularly qualified to examine: what impact will Mike’s dishonesty have on the intersection of theatre and journalism?

A huge number of people are familiar with Daisey’s work creating and performing topical monologues at some of the most prestigious venues in America, from the Seattle Rep to New York’s Public Theatre to the Woolley Mammoth in Washington, D.C. A much smaller number of people know of the work produced by NewsWrights United, a theatre company I co-founded and serve as Executive Director. We dramatize news using a form invented in the early 20th century called the living newspaper, and all of our stories are researched and written by local Seattle playwrights. (Memorable examples include Scot Augustson staging the farcical misadventures of a reporter/photographer duo sent to Detroit a week early to cover the Seahawks only Superbowl appearance; and on the serious side, Pamela Hobart Carter’s lyric poem/play about the psychic damage done by the Green River Killer.) On first appearances, NewsWrights United and Mike Daisey seem to occupy similar territory in the art/news nexus, but in actuality I believe we do something fundamentally different, and if I can tease apart for you these differences, I earnestly hope to convince you that coverage of news in the theatre is something worth saving even if Mike Daisey’s methods are not.

I predict two reactions to this crisis from artistic administrators at U. S. regional theatres. The first is already in evidence. Institutions that have already booked Mike will mostly stick with him, echoing his essential tack: “Yeah, lying to the public radio program TAL was wrong, but lying in the theatre is obviously eminently forgivable. After all—heck!—isn’t all theatre lying?” Artistic administrators are not widely known for the courage of their convictions, however, so I further predict that over the next year or two, while the controversy dies down, they will quietly divest themselves of as much Daisey stock as possible, so long as it doesn’t cost them too much to dump it. What’s worse, I also predict they will take the dreadfully wrong-headed step of underscoring this divestment with an abandonment of all new work that explores the intersection of theatre and journalism. (The exception to this new silent ban will be, perversely, Mike’s inevitable one-man apologia, which regional houses will be falling over each other to stage.)

But forsaking the theatre/journalism intersection does not have to be our future. With hard work, honest self-examination and courage we can take this opportunity not to withdraw but advance the genre. As a once and, with luck, future practitioner of news theatre, I venture to offer some practical advice on how we might achieve this.

Expand the Pool

Beyond his extraordinary talent as a storyteller, Mike’s shows appeal to regional theaters across the country because they are cheap and easy to mount. Most important, they are portable. If you are looking to plug a little topicality into your otherwise staid season, you cannot do it more easily than by giving Mike a call.

Living newspapers are much more difficult. To create effective alternatives to the Daisey Debacle, you have to give up some of the conveniences of the one-man show; most crucially, you have to give up the idea of “one-man.” Actual plays are vast collaborative efforts, featuring dialogue among and between more than one player on stage. The play development process contains a built-in organic vetting process that zeroes in on “truth” even when the story, like Agony/Ecstasy, is more accurately classified as fiction.

For instance, I am working with Rebecca Olson’s project Custom Made Plays to develop a script for her and another actor. Every week I sit in a room with them and the director, carefully combing through the script with questions. The process is gentle but relentless, and when a false note gets rooted up, we pounce to replace it with something more “honest.” Many of the moments in Agony/Ecstasy that Daisey promised us were real were not. In retrospect, they reek of bad fiction now that we know that is exactly what they are.

I reach into my satchel, and I take out my iPad. And when he sees it, his eyes widen, because one of the ultimate ironies of globalism, at this point there are no iPads in China. …. 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.”

Daisey’s a fine writer and I have no doubts he could have avoided this tripe, offering instead something genuinely brilliant, if he had only admitted it was fiction in the first place and then collaborated with performers and a director to sharpen it.

Living newspapers expand the pool in more than one dimension. Beyond just other actors in the room, you must also let in other writers. How much would anyone trust a newspaper with only one reporter who also served as the sole editor? NewsWrights United engaged several local playwrights for its living newspaper about the demise of the actual newspaper, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. By spreading the attack, we were able to cover a number of different beats—sports, politics and arts coverage at the P-I—in a wonderfully varied spectrum of styles, some of which implicitly “watermarked” their stories as fictionalization (but more on “watermarking” later.) Using more artists allows you to cover more kinds of stories, leading to another way to better provide theatrical news…

Up Your Local Content

It certainly was exciting to watch “David” Mike take on “Goliath” Apple from the stage of my local regional theatre; and certainly my local regional theatre enjoys, along with regional theatres across the country, the imprimatur of international relevance when such a story as Agony/Ecstasy gets told.  However, we lose a huge opportunity when our big houses keep mounting the very same one-man show, instead of staging local news that actually has as much, if not more, to do with the lives of local audiences as does Applegate. Let’s dare to flip the model and have each theatre produce its own living newspapers, telling stories about their own communities, and sure, plugging in national stories such as those Mike tells when appropriate.

I promise you: locally grown journalistic theatre is not only doable, it’s been done. In NewsWrights United’s last effort, The New New News: A Living Newspaper, we locally sourced nearly all of our stories about the crisis in journalism brought on by the digital age. Our play It’s Not in The P-I: A Living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper gave voice to locally beloved P-I reporters so that a community eager to hear their tales finally had the opportunity that no other medium would give.  We also broke important exclusives into the buy-out process that the Heart Corporation used to cherry-pick and union bust their newsroom as they shuttered the print version of The Seattle P-I and moved to an all on-line edition.  It didn’t hurt that one of our founding producers, Tom Paulson, is a professional journalist, formerly the P-I's science reporter, and currently writing for NPR’s Global Health site, Humanosphere.

Use “Watermarks”

Not everything that takes place in a theater is theatre. If this is news to you, you might not be to blame. The theater = theatre fallacy is happily perpetrated by artistic administrators to fill their seasons with the easiest fare to produce. (Click here to see my essay on this.) True theatre is rife with “watermarks” built into both the text and context of a play to remind you, sometimes explicitly but mostly implicitly, that what you are seeing is to some degree false.

“Watermarks?” You say. “How come I’ve never heard of these watermarks before?” Well, for two reasons: One, I just started using the term in a theatrical context about a week ago when I was trying to explain why Mike should not be allowed to take refuge in our art form. Two, watermarks are so endemic to theatre that we tend to look right through them, like reading glasses. The Greeks used masks as watermarks. Shakespeare and his contemporaries stitched their plays out of the watermarking fabric of Iambic pentameter. Not a single tradition within our grand form lacks them, but an exhaustive list is superfluous to this argument, because the definition of theatre is the ultimate watermark: two or more people staging a live dialogue (before you ask, no, it doesn’t have to be with words) within the physical perception of other people. Think about it. Someone tells you a story on the street. She could be lying. She could be telling the truth. But two or more people obviously acting out a story in front of you? Without question there’s some tomfoolery going on here.

Of course there is an important stipulation implicit to the tradition of tomfoolery and even blatent dishonesty in the theatre: we demand ardent honesty about our dishonesty. We tell you were going to lie, before we do it, while we do it, and after we do it.

If we shadows have offended,
think but this; and all is mended
that you have but slumbered here
while these visions did appear 

When you reach the certainty that we paltry players are lying, you can begin to understand that we are actually telling the truth. Daisey could have easily entered this tradition. He could have done all the good works he claims to have hoped to have done within it. Instead he took the risk that selling fiction as non-fiction would get him further. It did. But he got caught. And now he’s run back into our house claiming sanctuary. Brother Daisey has forgotten that theatre’s unwritten canon is as unyielding as the ecclesiastic: the crimes of the church can be punished within the church. If he wants sanctuary here, he will have to work hard and long at his penance.

Here’s a simple rule of thumb about watermarks: a theater (i.e. the venue) cannot serve as a watermark; theatre (i.e. the work of art) must contain the watermarks that prove it false, and thus prove it true theatre. Otherwise you’re just some guy telling me a story and if you tell me explicitly that what you’re saying is true, I am likely to take you at your word.

A living newspaper has an even greater obligation than conventional theatre to watermark early, often and obviously. For example, when we staged the Twitter stream of the Maurice Clemmons manhunt (He killed four Puget Sound cops in cold blood), we did not alter a single word of the tweets, though obviously, since there were over five thousand, we had to whittle them down considerably. We knew we could not give an accurate portrayal of what it was like to witness this stream in real time. No one could. Not only was it a moment passed, but in a way it was a meta-moment. No one person witnessed it in its entirety. So we posited the next best thing. We staged the stream as a symphony of actors dressed in blue bird suits, evoking the Twitter logo. We weren’t just trying to be funny (though god I hope we were). We were saying, “Obviously we can’t give you the literal truth. Pay no attention to the blue bird suits if you don’t want to, but every (often idiotic) word these actors declaim was actually tweeted over that 3-day ordeal.” (Here's a segment on this section by Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW did .)

Not only did Mike refuse to use watermarks, he actively defumigated the theatre of all its delicious anti-sanctity.

“… Mike told at least me time and time again [that the story] was true. He insisted that “This is a work of non-fiction” be printed in playbills.” 

— Alli Houseworth,
former marketing/communications director
at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. 
(You can read her excellent essay by clicking here.)

Mike didn’t want a watermark within a mile of any house he played. He wanted us to believe every word he charmed us with. And now he encourages his defenders to ridicule and condescend to the very people who took him at his word. "We are all liars and hypocrites," says Mike. There is something particularly vicious about the man who would punish others simply for being the victims of his sins.

Act Like it Matters

The worst thing I heard in response to Daisey’s dishonesty was this from a friend of a friend on Facebook:

“I never believe you theater folk - you're a rascally bunch.”

Yeah, we’re rascally. But sometimes we are able to illuminate stories that journalists themselves are not willing to touch, like when NewsWrights covered the closing of the P-I. And sometimes we are able, like Daisey, to tell a story like Agony/Ecstasy, in such a moving way that we inspire people, perhaps otherwise impossible to inspire, to action. However, in order to poach a bit on journalism’s turf we have to be trusted.  Do we really want to give up this wonderfully fertile ground just because Mike Daisey lied and then excused his lies as so much “theatre”? Do we really want to let him claim sanctuary in our church where we have established traditions stretching across millennia of being scrupulously honest about our dishonesty?

In answer to this question, the silence from big house artistic administrators so far has been pristine. Clearly theatre has a leadership vacuum in addition to its identity and relevance crises. No one seriously denies that we are simply not producing enough new, fresh, locally sourced material to keep our audiences engaged like Shakespeare’s were, or even Shaw’s. Projects like Daisey’s and NewsWrights United’s help mitigate the problem, but only if we take the issue of truthfulness seriously. We have to act like it matters. We have to show our audiences that we give the issue of truth consideration and respect, or they will walk away from us forever.

Comments

[Paul Mullin]

In fairness, the silence from the big houses that have staged Daisey's work is no longer pristine. This from Woolly Mammoth:

http://woollymammothblog.com/2012/03/21/further-thoughts-on-the-mike-daisey-episode/

"For Woolly’s part, we want to specifically apologize for including the line “a work of non-fiction” in our playbill. In hindsight, we wish we had interrogated Mike on this point. (In a recent radio interview, we said this line was not included in our playbill, and we were mistaken—a case of bad fact-checking on our own part.)"

Good on ya, Howard Shalwitz and Jeff Herrmann.

[Josh Parks]

Came across this recently:

Words do not express fact,
Phrases do not reveal the delicate motion of mind.
He who accepts words is lost,
He who adheres to phrases is deluded.

[Paul Mullin]

If you grasp Josh's comment precisely, there is no Shakyamuni Buddha before you and no Maitreya Buddha after you.

Gasho!

[Josh Parks]

Let me be the first to admit that I am deluded.

[William Salyers]

The idea that theatre is a tapestry woven from falsehoods is a pernicious one. It can be seen at the level of individual artists when an actor, often but not always young in his/her craft, has the mistaken idea that theirs is the art of putting on a mask, rather than removing one. The audience knows this even when they don't know they know it, which is why they speak of a character being "believable" (or not).
This discussion of truth at the very heart of the craft is one worth having. Perhaps we can thank Daisey for that much, at least. And we can thank you, Paul, for another excellent, thoughtful, and thought-provoking essay.

[Jim Jewell]

I want to "like" Bill's comment because apparently I am addicted to Facebook.

It is an important discussion, and it is too bad we seem resistant to having it. Clearly, Paul and many others, me included, are willing to jump in, but the defenders of Daisey's position seem to have little to no interest.

[Nathan Sorseth]

When I read Woolly Mammoth's first "Thoughts" on the Daisey Debacle, I was extremely irritated at the way the theatre's leadership seemed to be rallying the troops on the wrong hill. I wasn't surprised, though, since this incident appears to be located on a fault line - the place where the tectonic plate of artistic integrity is steadily and inexorably shoved under the plate of commercial consideration and institutional reputation.

What really frosted me, though, was the way in which theatre voices were rallying to the "artistic license" argument, even though this was never (read: *NEVER*) the issue. It made me feel stupid, by association...

Now, reading the Woolly Mammoth's revised "Thoughts"... I'm not even sure what it is that I'm looking at. Is it an apology? Is it a retraction, or a clarification?... To me, it appears to be an attempt at self-justification: there are the same arguments that were used before about the "power of the storytelling", the "conversation" and "lively debate" sound-bites and, to top it all off, a blurb about the "difference between art and journalism" that is simply a re-worded version of Mike's own "mistaken context" excuse.

In short, I'm not really seeing anything different from Woolly Mammoth.

I hate to say it, but I don't expect anything to change until the theatres that book Mr. Daisey stop booking him. And I may be wrong, but I can't imagine that there's going to be much appetite among the general public for a discredited autobiographical performer's next piece...

[Lucia]

Beautiful essay - very important! Thank you!

[Ginger]

You wanted a Daisey defender, you've got one. I have seen most of Mike's monologues over the past dozen years, and I do not understand what is so different, and therefore unforgivable, about this one - other than he got a hell of a lot of attention for it. Mike's work is effective because they aren't about him so much as that his experience is a gateway to examining something much broader - the 90s tech boom, the finance industry, Nikola Tesla, to name a few. Mike's show '21 Dog Years' about working at Amazon.com was the first I saw. In it, he spoke of hanging up on customers mid-call to fudge his metrics. He described Amazon's main office building as overrun with packs of dogs. Were these things literally true? Maybe. But I understood that while the details may not have been true in a *literal* sense (unless they were), both spoke an essential truth about what it was like to work at Amazon at that time (there were a lot of dogs). As an audience member, whether I'm watching Mike or another monologist, I don't spend any time thinking if the incidents described - particularly personal ones - really happened, in precisely the way described, or not. Because the point of the personal stories is to set the correct scene, invoke the correct emotions. The truth at the heart of things, if you will. This is precisely the way 'Agony and Ecstasy' was built, and I don't see why it should be judged any differently. (I'm referring specifically to the monologue here - not Mike's subsequent appearances on news programs and TAL) Mike's experiences in China - and yes, in fact he DID have those experiences in China, not substantively different than described in the show - were not supposed to convey information so much as to set the scene, invoke the emotions, describe the emotional truth of his journey from Apple fanboy to someone genuinely moved by the sacrifices people made at work every day to make our crap. He didn't invent their suffering. He didn't dream up their frustration. At worst, some of these personal experiences in question (such as the bit quoted as "bad fiction" above) are composites of people he spoke to, or maybe punched-up versions of less dramatic moments (like the cone on the highway overpass). This isn't a guy sitting in his hotel inventing scenarios. It's a writer taking the inelegant messiness of his fumbling around China to learn about something that NOBODY was writing about, and turning it into a story. A story deliberately designed to inspire in his audiences the kind of awakening he felt while there - something that must be recreated more than simply told. And a story that is rigorously sound on *the facts of the situation* (that is, the state of electronics manufacturing in the Special Economic Zone), in other words, the facts that *matter.* After reading so much vitriol about how Mike Daisey is the Enemy of Truth, I still, honestly, don't get what enrages people so much. Is it that he probably visited three factories and not ten? That he talked to 50 people and not 200? That the guards at Foxconn maybe had guns or maybe they didn't? Or is it that he implied illegal union leaders met at Starbucks (which, in the context of his delivery in the show, is obviously a joke). I agree that printing "this is a work of non-fiction" in the playbill was overreaching - but printing "this is a work of fiction" would have been equally wrong. "This is a story about a fanboy and the company he loved meeting in a foreign land" - Would that have made everything all better?

[Miryam]

Paul and Jim,
I've been hesitating writing this in public, but I'm going to take a crack at it, while possibly earning your wrath: Your efforts in NewsWrights United, while worthy, didn't end up making compelling theater, fact-checked or not.
Practiced enough, maybe it would move in that direction, but so far, it didn't ignite anything or change any hearts or minds.
Mike did. He probably could have done so, as Misha suggested, without those hyper-fictitious accounts of clawhands and poisoned kids, and so maybe that was his overreach.
When NewsWrights can get ahold of a story and tell it as grippingly and immediately and get us to necessarily pay attention we don't want to pay, then maybe you can equate your journalistic playwriting with Mike's work and call him out on it.
Right now, it just seems...high-handed at minimum.

[Paul Mullin]

Thank you, Miryam. I appreciate your candor. See? Honesty has a place after all.

Your argument seems to be that since my art isn't as good as Mike's I have no standing to evaluate his methods. This is a new tack. And it intrigues me.

I wonder what other people think. Is there anyone else out there willing to weigh in on this question? For the purpose of keeping the conversation flowing, I will provisionally allow those of you whose art is inferior to Mike's to comment.

[Miryam]

I think my comment didn't apply to "isn't as good as" but to scope. James Frey's blunders regarding non-fiction did not then translate to impacting my book, Money Sucks! Money Strategies for Real Life, though both were purported to be non-fiction. Because his memoir turned out to be faked, that did not immediately discredit my work. Not a close enough comparison?

I previously compared the KONY 2012 initiative. That purports to be a documentary. It is selective in some of its facts, since they perhaps used to be true but are no longer. However, it's an advocacy piece.

Again, I think that Mike's advocacy might have gone too far in conflating other stories with his own. That Would Not have been a problem "just" in the theater realm, really.

I think it was a problem when moved to the TAL platform, without clarification or disclosure. Indeed, I think the TAL platform could have gone Ahead with the story if Mike had clarified which parts might be at issue, and they could have stripped those from his piece prior and then been properly contextual.

"News" is meant to be a report. It is not meant to stir emotions, necessarily, nor to evoke a "call to action." However, theater is not generally thought of as such a passive event. Your efforts at NewsWrights would seem therefore to need to elevate the piece beyond reporting.

I would like to know what you think NewsWrights is supposed to accomplish if it does Not move beyond reporting? Any move beyond reporting news changes the news and puts an intention on it that may never have been a part of the event. It advocates in one way or the other.

Game Change may be a double-fact-checked movie and every line uttered may be vetted, but the fact that it is a movie changes it to make it advocate more of One Point of View. That doesn't make it bad. It just inevitably has to take that on because it is not news. It is >their< retelling of history.

Your contention seems to be that Mike's actions threatens YOUR efforts to do something real, and have it not be believed. That is what I think is over-reach on your part. I don't believe that Mike's indiscretions impact you. One friend who says he doesn't believe any theater people doesn't a whole world of disbelievers make.

It's scale, not "good art".

[Miryam]

In other words, people often feel reflected upon when a member of a larger group they identify with/in does something wrong and feel that they are personally diminished through that association. Like Jews with Madoff, though few Jews have ever had as much money as he played with, or some criminal who is black or Irish or Scandinavian....

It sounds more like you identify with Mike's getting caught in a lie with you being associated just because you're in "theater" with him.

[Jim Jewell]

Can't disagree more with your conclusion, Miryam, though I take some of your other points as valid. Maybe Paul just referred to one friend, but I've heard callers and read commenters who have said in fact this incident will make them question the veracity of what they see in the theatre, and especially from activist theatre. It matters that Mike chose to clumsily walk a fine line, and it matters even more the rhetoric he employed to defend it.

And, frankly, I'm fine with fact-checked theatre having to work harder to achieve change even if it falls short, and will always take the harder road over the shortcut.

[Wesley K. Andrews]

Nice work Paul. In conversations with friends, we all agreed that the "truth in labeling" aspect of all this was crucial. Your observation that two people having an invented dialogue is an intrinsic label (watermark) is really important.

I've always used the caveat "Based On A True Story" in my storytelling work and feel especially good about that now.

[Louise Penberthy]

I'll never think of Mike Daisey's work the same way again. Even at the time, I wondered why he was railing against Apple and Foxconn, while he was wearing clothing, and sitting at a table, and lit by lights that were produced under conditions that were just as bad!

I also don't think that Daisey's misrepresenting his work reflects on or affects your work, Paul. They're different enough that I don't think it matters. In any case, do what you're passionate about. Let him stew in his own juices. Do what you know needs to be done.

About “It's Not in the PI.” I agree with Miryam, it wasn't a good show. I wouldn't say this to any other playwright but you, Paul, but I left at intermission. Not because the story didn't need to be told, but because I wasn't compelled by the telling. Some of the stories were interesting and heartfelt, and well told, but most of them weren't.

Theatre needs to tell the Truth. We need to tell the stories that need to be told, AND tell them well.