A Bite of the Big Apple

Mike Daisey is pudgy,baby-faced and American-the kind of guy you'd expect to crack you up with every sentence.

In The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,American monologist Mike Daisey guides the audience through the highs and lows of the Apple CEOs world

Mike Daisey is pudgy,baby-faced and American the kind of guy you’d expect to crack you up with every sentence. What you dont expect is a living-on-the-edge attitude to art,for Daisey is an extemporaneous monologist performing solo monologues on stage before an audience of hundreds,without any rehearsal. Thinking happens when people speak. The majority of theatre is a legacy of dead words,a frozen thing pretending to be alive, says the 37-year-old,who is on his first visit to India,a five city tour,with his 16th and latest work The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. (The play will not come to Chandigarh,but will be staged at the India International Centre in Delhi on August 19.)

The performance charts the rise and fall and rise of the Apple CEO and was driven by Daiseys own deep connection and love for Apple products. One day,he read about about an iPhone customer who finds that his new phone,which should have been blank,contained pictures of the factory interior where it was made. It made me aware in a deep way where my electronics came from, he says.

The final trigger was a report that a young man working in a factory in Shenzhen,China,that supplied such electronic products to the first world,had committed suicide. Daisey began to probe,and spent days in Shenzhen masquerading as a buyer from an American firm. The working conditions in these factories were dreadful,abhorrent,staggering, he says. In the last seven months itself,there have been 13 similar suicides workers throwing themselves from the roofs of factories,indicating that it is tied with the employment practices.

Now,many of these MNCs want to move their factories to India and use your people. China has found that such corporations give very little back, says Daisey,who came up with the structure of the piece in June.

His message is couched in a story with multiple threads autobiographical anecdotes merging into the story of Steve Jobs and the story of technology.

A self-taught performer,Daisey takes his place behind a spotlit table on stage,and moulds his performance according to the audience. Though the structure is pre-decided,every performance is a new work narrated with skill and backed by intensive research. Northern Maine where I grew up,is known for traditional storytelling and so I

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always had a desire to create something, he says. Hes been performing since 1997 and has mastered his art enough to have the

New York Times call him a master storyteller,one of the finest solo performers of his generation.

As he walks around the streets of Chennai,his first stop in India,Daisey takes in the sights and sounds. Will it become a part of his performance? Even he doesnt know,till he takes to the stage.

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