Mike Daisey Takes on Ayn Rand, Utopias, and the Moon

Fucking Fucking Fucking Ayn Rand, says monologuist Mike Daisey, is really two stories woven together: a pocket biography of Ayn Rand and a memoir of his relationship with her work. (It’s also 90 minutes long, and at Seattle Rep through May 11; tickets.) Daisey encountered Rand’s Fountainhead, the story of visionary architect Howard Roark and his lonely battle to be awesome, back in high school, when it was assigned to him by “a charismatic teacher.”

Many people have met Rand that way, at that age. High school is a time where people are being sorted out. Teachers subtly exert their influence through reading recommendations, letting certain students know that they are not like the others.

For Daisey, the success of works like Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (that’s the one where awesome people stop being awesome at their jobs because they feel exploited) isn’t that mysterious. When the Rep’s publicity describes “her infantile philosophies and turgid prose,” they could well be lifting from any number of critical reviews at the time of her books’ publication, but that never stopped millions from being served. The books were meant to be “memetic weapons,” not highbrow literature, Daisey told me in a phone interview.

His Apple-exposé monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, is a memetic weapon, too, he said. It succeeded in planting an idea that’s very hard to dislodge, despite the critical fusillades aimed at its teller. Translated into six languages, it’s already had more than forty productions.

“There’s a blindness in our culture to Ayn Rand’s kind of appeal,” he said. The left has tried to censor her, in its way (try walking around with Fountainhead, and note how many times people ask you why you’re reading it, as if you’ve perhaps lost a bet) by sniffily critiquing “selfish” Objectivism, and highlighting those excruciating sex scenes that praise black-eye foreplay and a jackhammer-like technique. But this has never dampened the ardor of Rand fans. “It has to do with class in America, her appeal to boot-strappers,” concluded Daisey, who sounded excited by the topic and yet restrained, keeping himself from launching into the monologue then and there.

Both the Ayn Rand monologue and American Utopias, which he presented at the Rep last week and would sit well on a mental shelf that contained David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, are relatively young works, part of a spate of nine (whoops, ten) pieces Daisey has created recently in collaboration with The Public Theater (which made a point of supporting Daisey throughout the Agony-related blowback). Daisey said the new works are more “fluid,” even describing American Utopias as a two-hour-fifteen-minute prelude to a 6-minute performance.

(I didn’t mention it in my review, but at Daisey’s May Day performance of Utopias, he happened to bring the crowd outside as helicopters chopped at the air above a protest downtown. A text I got read: “Ran into a riot, complete with smoke grenades, coming out of WAC!” It was a strikingly apropos scene, since part of Daisey’s motivation for leading the audience into the open air was to emphasize the difference between a placid “audience” and the same group perceived as a “crowd” or even “mob,” when seen out of doors. Daisey chose not to call out the helicopters, instead letting them operate as an ominous soundtrack — “Just because you can extemporize, doesn’t mean you should,” he told me.)

Struck by his use of a single red-pepper prop (real, and use-tested vigorously by Seattle Rep staff to ensure that peppers would stand up to performance conditions) and video of the occupation of Zuccotti Park, I asked about the overlaps between monologue and theatre. In narrative, Daisey responded, you have complete control over time and space, you can move between settings with an incredible speed usually not possible in a play. And where theatre is at least in part a crucible, with actors’ interactions generating an emotional heat, first-person monologue can be cooler, able to take on social issues and politics without veering helplessly into the didactic. A monologue is a person letting the audience in on a problem.

Though his sets tend to foreground Daisey sitting at a table, he’s often made a point of subverting your suspension of disbelief. That pepper prop is real, for instance. The LEDs used in the Agony set were sourced from Shenzhen. During If You See Something, Say Something, he held a jar of trinitite.

This fall, his work at the Public culminates in one of those feats of endurance that he’s prone to. For a show called Faces of the Moon, he’ll deliver different monologues for 29 straight nights — all of which will be uploaded, and available for audiences worldwide. “At more than forty hours,” goes the promotional copy, “All the Faces of the Moon will be the largest piece of sustained theatrical narrative since the 13th century medieval mystery plays.” This also is fluid, but you can expect it to touch on “the secret history of the space race, notorious art forgeries, the angry ghosts of class and communism, and the still-beating heart of the military industrial complex.” Stay tuned on Daisey’s blog.