At the intersection of today’s American realities and mindboggling fictional dystopia sits Mike Daisey, at a table with a glass of water and a metal briefcase (yes, the one filled with irony). His monologue performance for the Fringe Festival at Woolly Mammoth Theatre is a stellar showcase of storytelling skills, bringing the audience along a trip through the desert to Trinity, the site of the first nuclear bomb test in Los Alamos, with a narrative woven around the history and build-up of today’s massive “homeland security” system.

Daisey has already made a name for himself as an exceptional monologist, most recently performing the well-received How Theater Failed America in New York this past spring. If You See Something, Say Something, Daisey’s Fringe offering, like Theater, draws on his own experiences and interests. His childhood fascination with the Bomb and the endless fear-mongering during the Cold War, his trip to Trinity, and reading Shame, the memoir of Sam Cohen, one of the men who built the Bomb, coalesce into a scathing and hilarious critique of today’s War on Terror.