Show Description

HOW THEATER FAILED AMERICA is transferring Off-Broadway to the Barrow Street Theater beginning May 16th for six weeks only--you can order tickets here. 

"Absolutely hilarious...one of the finest solo performers of his generation."
- The New York Times

"Daisey's skill is that he is able to talk about the historical and make it human, the personal and make it universal, so that the listener is both informed and transformed."
- Paper Magazine

Master storyteller Mike Daisey sinks his razor-sharp wit into a subject he knows well: the American theater, from the sublimely crass to the genuinely ugly. From gorgeous new theaters standing empty as cathedrals, to “successful” working actors traveling like migrant farmhands, to an arts culture unwilling to speak or listen to its own nation, Daisey takes stock of the dystopian state of theater in America: a shrinking world with smaller audiences every year. Fearlessly implicating himself and the system he works within, Daisey seeks answers to essential and dangerous questions about the art we’re making, the legacy we leave the future, and who it is we believe we’re speaking to.

MIKE DAISEY has been called “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation” by the New York Times for his many monologues, including Monopoly!, TRUTH, Invincible Summer, Tongues Will Wag, The Ugly American, I Miss the Cold War, Great Men of Genius, Wasting Your Breath and 21 Dog Years, and over the past decade he has performed his unique brand of extemporaneous storytelling at venues such as the Public Theater, American Repertory Theatre, the Spoleto Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Cherry Lane, Yale Rep, the Noorderzon Festival, Portland Stage Company, Intiman, Performance Space 122, and many more. He’s been a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman, his work has been heard on the BBC, NPR and the National Lampoon Radio Hour, and his groundbreaking series All Stories Are Fiction is available through Audible.com. Currently he’s a commentator for NPR’s Day To Day and PRI’s Studio 360, a contributor to WIRED, Slate and Salon, a web contributor to Vanity Fair and Radar Magazine, a frequent performer and host with the Moth, and his writing appears in the anthology The Best Tech Writing 2006. His first film, Layover, is being distributed by Lars von Trier’s company Zentropa, and he stars in the Lawrence Krauser feature Horrible Child. His first book, 21 Dog Years: A Cubedweller’s Tale, was published by the Free Press and he is working on a second book, Great Men of Genius, adapted from his monologues about genius and megalomania in the lives of Bertolt Brecht, P.T. Barnum, Nikola Tesla, and L. Ron Hubbard. He lives with his director, collaborator and co-conspirator, Jean-Michele Gregory, in New York City.