Geva Theater Center’s own version [the title reads “Version 2.0”] of Mike Daisey’s fascinating, hilarious, and deeply disturbing monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,is audience-rewarding proof that Daisey’s notorious polemic is going to continue in our theatrical repertories, perhaps with many small genetic alterations in its progeny. There are, and have been, other such slightly modified offspring, and there seems to be a likelihood that this one, directed by Geva Artistic Director Mark Cuddy, and superbly performed by Remi Sandri, may continue elsewhere from time to time.
Daisy is a brilliant monologist whose writing talent was always recognized, and he has now published and released the basic script. There was a noisy scandal over “errors” in his original version, and they have been excised, but it now seems that none were really incorrect in substance – only in the pretense that Daisey personally had observed some of the horrors that shocked his audiences.
Don’t get too worried: the show is not nightmarish; much is very funny indeed; all of its insanely complex material is clearly presented; and audiences all over the globe have loved it. The “agony” in the title has nothing to do with the cancer that Steve Jobs died of; in fact, his death is really not a part of the story.
The single speaker is an actor basically playing Daisey, explaining his long, geeky adoration of the gadgets that have entirely revolutionized our communication, and telling the story of the impossibly brilliant oddball, Jobs, who reinvented our technology, then reinvented his reinvention.
But mad-fan Daisey wanted to go see how those gorgeously designed i-Creations [iPad, iPhone, iCloud, etc.] were made. And his trip to China – more specifically, to Shenzhen, the city built for the center that makes all of Apple’s products and is larger than New York City – disclosed a world of virtual slave labor, damaged and dying children and unacknowledged horrors.
So, I guess that polemic isn’t really the correct word for this fluidly shifting monologue. Ultimately, its biography, commentary, shock therapy, and joking leave us with questions to ask. And perhaps the most difficult is why we don’t question, and how we can question not only what we value and how we obtain it but also under what conditions it is made for us. We ask about unsafe toys but not how unsafe the making of them was.
Remi Sandri is my favorite of the several excellent actors who have returned to Geva repeatedly to perform in varied works, and I freely admit a strong bias toward his intelligent, appealing command as an actor. He makes this speaker quirky and multi-faceted but seems more impressive and likable than Daisey and some others I’ve seen on videos presenting this piece. I find his sincerity and believability all the more effective in holding and involving the audience. This is a thought-provoking and significant theatre work, and I doubt that it has received a notably better presentation.
