Stories to make Apple founder cry

PERFORMER Mike Daisey's work addresses Steve Jobs and the world his company created.

Mike Daisey

WHEN Apple founder Steve Jobs stepped down as chief executive of the technology giant last month, Mike Daisey got the news from a trusty source: his iPhone.

The New York monologist and self-described Apple fan-boy, a kind of Mike Moore for the digital age, admits he fleetingly contemplated how the entrepreneur's resignation might affect his one-man show, a work that charts the rise of the Jobs empire.

"But the thing about this show is it's extemporaneous. I tell it differently -- new -- every night," he says. "It changes constantly. So, despite anything else that's happening [in Jobs's life], that's not really an issue for the show."

Still, Daisey hasn't performed the monologue since the announcement by Jobs -- who has a rare form of pancreatic cancer and was pictured last month noticeably emaciated -- that he would hand over the reins of the world's most valuable company to his protege Tim Cook.

"The factual basis of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is valid and will remain," Daisey says. "But as for the inflection and the tone . . . they will be discovered with an audience. At the Sydney Opera House, as it happens."

First performed this year in India, Daisey's show is comprised of two "braided" narratives -- one about the 56-year-old Jobs's personal history and vision; the other about the human cost of that vision, forged as it is "in the furnace of Western technology": China.

"I know some will be deeply affected by what's happening [with Jobs's health]," Daisey says. "But at the same time, the fundamentals of the show -- the facts about how our devices are made and the consequences of our choices to make them that way -- are larger than any one person."

Daisey spent two months in southern China last year, posing as an American businessman to see first-hand the manufacturing industry in which the majority of Western technology is created. Witnessing working conditions in which people "die on the production line and others sleep in cement-cell dorms" brought home for Daisey the divide between technology manufacturing and consumer use.

"I went to to Shenzhen, the heart of the economic zone, because I wanted to evaluate the human cost of this huge industry," he says. "I interviewed hundreds of workers, including 13-year-olds labouring on the production line. It was shocking."

Daisey talked his way into the boardrooms of multinationals, and even found himself in talks with illegal, non-government unions about the "horrendous" working conditions. "I was scared. I mean, I don't do this sort of stuff usually," he says. "I was afraid all the time in China: a generalised, low-level hysteria, which was largely warranted."

He returned to America with enough ammunition for a new monologue, and began writing.

Jobs, to Daisey's knowledge, hasn't seen the show. But Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has, and was reduced to tears. "I made Wozniak cry," Daisey says, with more than a hint of pride. "He said he'd never ever be the same again after seeing the show."

The aim, Daisey says, is to change the behaviours of US companies such as Apple -- now worth $340 billion -- which outsource their labour at "great human cost". "I'm making progress, one show at a time," he says. Daisey himself owns "an iPhone, an iPad, a MacBook Pro -- all the things you'd expect for someone who is travelling around", but says the content of his show hasn't forced him to re-evaluate his possession of those objects.

"This experience certainly has changed my relationship with those devices," he says. "But I also realise that holding out is not tenable forever. I'm well aware of the unrelenting march of technology. That's something in the show that I talk about. It needs to be talked about."

Talking is Daisey's strong suit. The 38-year-old, speaking to The Australian from his home in New York, rarely comes up for air. "I'm actually just getting ready to go to Portland to do a 24-hour monologue," he says. "As far as I know, it's the first time that's been done. It's going to be stressful but fun."

Does he worry he might run out of material? "At first that was a concern," he says. "But eventually you get to that interesting place where you realise you have 45 hours of material. Then it's a problem of editing."

And that is where Daisey's wife comes in. Jean-Michele Gregory, director and producer, works on Daisey's shows, and the monologist is "fairly certain" she never tires of his natter at home. "Generally, things at home are more of a dialogue," he begins, before second-guessing himself. "Although I do speak in paragraphs, at times, rather than in sentences.

"Come to think of it, she does get a little sick of that . . . and she does let me know. She gives me a look -- a withering gaze that eviscerates just as it emasculates."

Daisey made his breakthrough with a 2001 dotcom-themed monologue 21 Dog Years, and has since performed shows on subjects as diverse as September 11 and L. Ron Hubbard to full houses around the world (his Pacific island-focused The Last Cargo Cult was a sell-out in Australia last year). But Daisey's family are still bemused at his chosen career.

"As a child, I actually didn't speak until quite late . . . I think not until I was about three years old," he says. "I'd just stare at people. The family loves to talk about it now. But even after I started talking, I didn't talk to anyone. I was very strange and misanthropic -- a weird little boy in remote northern town in northern Maine. We had no neighbours, so I spent a lot of time outside, alone, thinking."

He now spends most of his time inside, making other people think, and says it's all part of his calling. "It's the call of any artist to do work that's alive, that is conscious," he says. "Anyone who's not making thought-provoking work is just clogging up the space with their endless, prattling bullshit."

Daisey, also speaking at Sydney's Festival of Dangerous Ideas, an event headlined by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, says the key to good oratory is tempering it with humour.

"In Western thought, philosophy is increasingly divided. Our intellectuals couldn't possibly be entertaining, and our entertainment couldn't possibly be intellectual. That needs to change."

And he rejects any suggestion he is reviving an antiquated art form.

"I don't think the monologue really ever left. This is just storytelling," he says. "It's the naked singularity at the heart of the theatrical experience. The form that drove the Greeks to create a religion that became theatre. It's embedded in each of us."

Daisey is off again, another breathless, perfectly enunciated soliloquy drowning out any chance for further questions.

"You know, I'm very blessed. It's good work for one lifetime," he says, his voice winding down. "Just like technology, this -- storytelling -- is not going anywhere."

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, September 24-October 2, Sydney Opera House.