The unfortunate side effect is that his role as our guide is compromised and he undercuts some of the journalistic and dramatic power of what’s come before.
Not, however, in anything close to a fatal way. Daisey lays out in clear, mesmerizing detail Jobs’s brilliant conquest of the computer industry, and the ways in which that changed our lives. (Case in point: a wonderful anecdote about how that innocuous accessory, the mouse, was born.) And you don’t have to know geek lingo to keep up: Daisey demonstrates a sharp facility here for reducing software culture to illustrative bites. Computer geeks are “like lowland gorillas: They fight for dominance.” Jobs is a control freak and a genius, but he’s not a micromanager, Daisey says. No, “he is a nano-manager.”
Like his clear role model, the late Spalding Gray, Daisey has cultivated a recognizable performance style, from which he does not deviate on this evening, astutely directed by his longtime collaborator (and wife) Jean-Michele Gregory. A big guy dressed in dark shirt and slacks, he presides with grandeur from behind a table, gazing out at us like some imposing professor of the dark arts.
He’s framed by set designer Seth Reiser’s intriguing backdrop, a black panel adorned with hundreds of light-emitting diodes that constantly change their linear patterns. The effect is both aesthetically pleasing and thematically relevant, for Daisey eventually will clue us in to what he sees as the sinister origin of the ubiquitous lamps.
The narrator is as keenly observant about his visit to the closely guarded factories of Shenzhen — a world he says he infiltrated through a bit of subterfuge — as he is about Jobs’s secretive universe. And the manner in which he links our dreamy devotion to Apple’s products to the devastatingly harsh realities of how they get to market will assure that you never look at your iPad or MacBook in quite the same way again.
Jobs, Daisey tells us, “is so good at making us need things we never knew we wanted.” And this agitated spinner of spoken arias has a gift for stories we didn’t know we needed to hear.
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs
Created and performed by Mike Daisey. Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory. Sets and lighting, Seth Reiser; dramaturgy, Miriam Weisfeld. About 1 hour 50 minutes. Through April 17 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, 641 D St. NW. Visit www.woollymammoth.net or call 202-393-3939.
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