Results tagged “autobiography”

Daisey is due lots of credit for his willingness to bite the hand that feeds him, if only just. He calls himself a "carrion bird of the American theater," aware that his popular monologues -- 2001's 21 Dog Years, about his spell as an Amazon.com clock-puncher; and last summer's Fringe Fest hit, If You See Something, Say Something, skewering our post-9/11 tendency to see terrorists in our cereal, among them -- appeal to theaters chiefly because they cost peanuts. He knows that if he's on the stage, then a play is not. He gets some comic mileage early on by reeling off the usual suspects in the murder of American stagecraft: Reagan, the Disney megalith, iPods, and (ahem) critics. But when he comes round to prosecuting his case, his target turns out to be the theater companies themselves, particularly the ones mortgaging their futures to ornate new buildings when they literally can't give tickets away to people younger than 30 to replenish an audience that's aging and dying off. "You only play to the people in the house, and there are less of them every year," Daisey observes ominously.