It's Like Fucking Paris Hilton (audience walk out on Mike Daisey)

So I saw this story while doing my morning information ablutions (I hesitate to call them "news"). This past weekend, Mike Daisey was performing his new monologue at ART in Cambridge when a group of 80 people - about a third of the audience - abruptly walked out, with one of them pausing long enough to pour a bottle of water onto the sheets of paper that served as Daisey's rudimentary script. This apparently was Daisey's only copy of his show, handwritten notes on three pages pulled from a yellow legal pad - I'm just amazed he was able to develop an entire show on that - and it was essentially ruined afterwards.

Because his entire show only exists on three sheets of yellow - now ruined - legal pad, he also records it every night, to keep a record of what it is and how it changes night to night. So when the walk out occured, the camera was rolling, and he got it all on tape, which he then posted on his blog and on YouTube.

A few notes before you watch. I think that the bit he was doing was really quite astute, and yet at the same time, when he got to the offending segment, I couldn't help but be a litle taken aback as well. In the context of the video, his switch to talking about, well, fucking Paris Hilton (and the ways in which he really pounded on the word, like a more genial David Mamet), I felt like, "oh, so this is sort of meant to be shocking, except that it isn't really"; I just sort of saw it as blandly tasteless. Yeah, I know, I'm becoming a 28 year old prude, and one who actually uses that word myself on a regular basis, but I thought, in this context, it was a little inappropriate.

So I can understand why the audience walks out. I don't agree with the way they handled it, but I can see why they do it. What is more fascinating - and the reason I'm posting the video - is to watch how Daisey deals with it, this intrusion of a real moment on the illusion that is live theatre. The shock giving way to confusion giving way to rage giving way to reconciliation. There is real danger in this, real pain, and it leads to a moment of real connection and real discovery, a moment that we lose these days in our slick, media world with its manufactured content, and one that is over all too soon after it begins. Daisey's monologue seems quite well done, and at the same time, it has that rehearsed air of, well, a performance, and you can hear that change in his voice when he starts the monologue over again. The wall goes back up, the artifice is back in place, and the script continues.

As someone who works in artifice and performance myself, who delights in the wall because it keeps your manufactured content safe, I can't decry the situation or the phenomenon. I can simply celebrate the moments when it falls away, when we're reminded that this is all real, and that we are all living in it, and something truly fascinating - and amazing - happens.

That guy pouring water on Daisey's outline? Say what you will about his actions and motivations, but it's a dramatic moment worthy of the Pulitzer.



Mike Daisey's website can be found at mikedaisey.com