Mike Daisey in “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” (Photo by Stan Barouh via Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company)
Earlier today This American Life caused a stir when host Ira Glass released a statement that the program was retracting a January story based on the monologuist Mike Daisey’s show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs on the grounds that Daisey lied to TAL‘s staff during the fact-checking process.
In his show and the subsequent radio segment, Daisey claimed to expose reprehensible working conditions at a factory in Shenzhen, China, where Apple’s coveted products, including the freshly released iPad 3, are manufactured. While subsequent investigations by publications including The New York Times confirmed the shoddy environment at Foxconn, the manufacturer that assembles devices by Apple and other major consumer electronics companies, TAL said today that Daisey’s story contains numerous fabrications.
Daisey is something of a fixture in the D.C. theater scene, especially to fans of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, where he has performed many of his monologues. Early shows of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs last April were widely praised for Daisey’s wit and what seemed like breathless investigatory work.
Woolly Mammoth, which booked Daisey for a remount of Agony and Ecstasy this summer, also announced earlier this week that he will perform a new show during the 2012-2013 season called American Utopias. In a statement shortly after the announcement from This American Life disavowing the Steve Jobs piece, Woolly said it was standing by Daisey:
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company is proud to have hosted the “birth” performance and a highly successful run of Mike Daisey’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a daring work of theatre that opened people’s eyes to some of the real working conditions in Chinese factories where high-tech products are manufactured—conditions which have been documented by subsequent journalistic accounts in The New York Times and other sources. It’s a core value of Woolly to present works that spark conversation around topics of socio-political importance, and we’re proud to have played a part in bringing these issues to national attention. We look forward to welcoming Mike back for an encore performance of the show this summer.
Of course, it’s worth considering the different burdens of veracity faced by a quasi-journalistic product like This American Life and a theater company. The radio program, in addition to today’s retraction, also announced it would devote tomorrow’s broadcast to scrubbing the record clean and that an event in Chicago next month celebrating Daisey’s work has been cancelled. In a statement posted on his website shortly after the retraction, Daisey wrote that “what I do is not journalism” and that “the tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.”
Fine. Woolly Mammoth is free to present Daisey’s monologue as performance art, which it certainly is, but to still call it a fount of jarring truths about one of the most valued and beloved corporations seems a little thinner today.
