I have just one complaint about Mike Daisey’s show American Utopias (at Seattle Rep through May 4), and, judging from its title — Fucking Fucking Fucking Ayn Rand (through May 11) — it may well apply to his next show, too. Unless you are a Marine, truck driver, or construction worker, you want to be careful how often you deploy the word “fuck” and its variations in the course of a two-and-a-half-hour show.
In Daisey’s case, if you removed half the instances, you’d still want to describe the evening as “profanity-laced.” At some point, it became a distracting tic, like any overused-for-emphasis adverb. If you know, as a Daisey fan, that he speaks extemporaneously from a sketched-out outline, then you hear him relying more and more on a crutch he uses to poke the audience with and assure himself we’re still there.
Otherwise, American Utopias finds Daisey — after his self-inflicted Agony — freed from the neoclassical monologue structure built from the bricks of strictly first-person, factual reportage. The program notes alert you to this, but so does the work itself, as Daisey takes liberties with his descriptions of children levitating as they approach the entrance to Disney World in Orlando. It may seem like nuance, but it opens up space for creative freedom that wasn’t always there when the Daisey-panopticon was seated at his rigorous table.
Minute-for-minute, the show contains a greater torrent of convulsive laughter and insight than anything I think I’ve seen from Daisey before. I don’t want to recount the show, and in this case my dark inertia is supported by Daisey’s thesis that the larger part of the experience is showing up for it. Suffice to say that the utopias encountered are Burning Man (one thing we all know with certainty, deep in our souls, says Daisey, is whether we need to go to Burning Man, or not), Disney World and his sister’s New Jersey annexation of its aesthetic, and the occupation of Zuccotti Park.
Daisey’s undergirding insight into utopia is that it’s a yearning for a kind of experience, not a location. More specifically, it’s sympathetic (he compares it to people grooving on a bass line) and time-based (time’s context keeps us present and engaged). One of Daisey’s gifts has always been a catholic perspective that seeks to understand if perhaps there’s something in common between the engaged theatre audience, Burning Man’s spectacle, and family-oriented Disney nirvana.
He’s storyteller enough not to play down his misgivings about a neo-hippie freakout in the desert (suddenly the theatre artist is the squarest person on the playa), or his inclination to put Occupy Wall Street on the back burner, since Zuccotti Park wasn’t likely to go anywhere soon. And a riff about Disney-blistered feet generated paroxysms of laughter. But there’s serious self-interrogation going on at the same time, about his (and our) tendency to sleepwalk along, seeking moments of unity as an end in themselves, rather than as fuel for action. In one sense, the difference between Burning Man and Seattle is that we think one city is permanent.
When I say I have just one complaint, that doesn’t mean I have no criticism to make, but on balance, my critique is appreciative. With Jean-Michele Gregory’s help, Daisey breaks the two-hour mark without intermission, the audience not merely rapt but responsive. There’s special-effects produce and a short video excerpt courtesy of Anonymous, and astonishingly delicate, suggestive lighting that delineates and joins Daisey’s verbal peregrinations and detours.
Daisey has, previously, strained to use theatre as a tool for inspiring action, refusing to let people sit there and nod knowingly, yes, the world tsk shameful well shall we get dessert? Here he makes a leap that I’m still marveling at, and wondering about, in that he puts the audience in action, and waits to see if theatre happens. I think something wonderful does.
