The apologetic phone call from Mike Daisey was a painful one, says Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s artistic director, Howard Shalwitz. It came the day before the shattering news was made public, news that served to undermine the veracity of an acclaimed monologue that Shalwitz’s company helped usher into being, and that was scheduled to return — triumphantly — to Woolly for a three-week run this summer.
Daisey’s account of the abuse of Chinese workers in the monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” had moved from the Woolly stage to New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater, and then to the national airwaves in January, courtesy of a segment on public radio’s “This American Life.” In a stunning retraction of the broadcast, host and executive producer Ira Glass said it had been discovered there were “significant fabrications” in Daisey’s recitation of what he had seen and heard in China. (Daisey’s Chinese translator said she did not recall the numbers and variety of aggrieved workers Daisey claimed to have spoken to.) Glass added that Daisey “lied to me” during the fact-checking process for the segment and as a result, a “mistake” was made in ever airing it.
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A debate has erupted after "This American Life" retracted a story by off-Broadway performer Mike Daisey, who claimed Apple Computer products are being manufactured in sweatshop-life conditions in China.
Shalwitz, however, came to a different conclusion, not concerning whether Daisey had made errors in judgment, but in how as an institution Woolly should respond. Amid the gathering furor, as commenters on social media went wild, the company’s former communications director called for a boycott of Daisey’s work, subscribers and others took to Woolly’s Web site to ventand irate theatergoers went so far as to demand refunds for their summer tickets, Woolly’s leadership decided to stick by Daisey and continue with plans for the return engagement of “Agony and Ecstasy.”
“I think our judgment, and we’re still forming it, is that we don’t think the mistakes Mike made were mistakes of malicious intent,” Shalwitz said in an interview Tuesday. “We think they were mistakes of overzealousness to get his message out. I think he was very incensed by what he saw in China.” (Alli Houseworth, Woolly’s former marketing and communications chief, noted angrily online that Daisey had even insisted that the words “This is a work of non-fiction” be printed in the Woolly program for “Agony and Ecstasy.”)
Shalwitz and his staff, however, thought it important to continue their relationship with Daisey, with whom the company worked on other monologues popular with critics and audiences, such as “If You See Something Say Something” and “The Last Cargo Cult.” Acknowledging that Daisey “was not scrupulous” in distinguishing between “things he witnessed in China and what he heard discussed in China,” Shalwitz added: “We have a lot of confidence in him, in his overall integrity as an artist.”
The episode has engendered a passionate debate in both journalistic and theater circles about Daisey’s manipulation of the reality of what he personally observed. In a talk at Georgetown University this week, Daisey copped to having lost his center of ethical gravity over the months of performing the show in what he describes as its “autobiographical, extemporaneous” style. He added that in granting “hundreds” of interviews as his accusations gained a media foothold — and further validated by a series of New York Times articles in December — his recitation of some statistics and other information to reporters became exaggerated.
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