Mike Daisey as Steve Jobs
MIKE DAISEY’S REVOLUTIONARY, HARROWING, AND HILARIOUS MONOLOGUE DEMANDS SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN THE CORPORATE SECTOR AND INSPIRES A GENERATION TO ACTION.
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company will remount the mega-hit monologue from the critically acclaimed team of Mike Daisey (creator and performer) and Jean-Michele Gregory (director), The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs from July 17–August 5, 2012.
Called the “best original American play of 2011” (The Washington Post), The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was first performed in the summer of 2010 at Woolly Mammoth and returned for its DC premiere in spring 2011. Since then, it has toured to 18 cities and been seen by over 75,000 people, including two runs off-Broadway at the Public Theater, and garnered national media attention including an in-depth New York Times piece on the human costs of manufacturing in Chinese factories, appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher and CBS Sunday Morning, and an adaptation of the show for NPR’s This American Life with Ira Glass, which has quickly become the most downloaded episode in that radio show’s history.
Acclaimed film-maker Michael Moore said of the show: “Mike Daisey, in addition to providing us with a riveting, hilarious, but ultimately gut-wrenching piece of theatre, may actually end up being singularly responsible for bringing Goliath to its knees.” And Jobs has indeed become a real tool for social change. It has sparked protest, including a petition with nearly 250,000 signatures calling for Apple to protect the Chinese workers who make their products, and has led Apple—for the first time in its history—to release a list of its suppliers and agree to outside auditing of its supply chain.
“The journey of this monologue has been an epic one,” said Mike Daisey, “and it was born at Woolly Mammoth, a pioneering theater that makes the kind of theater that breaks boundaries and changes the world. I couldn’t be more delighted to bring this work back to where it was born, just feet from our nation’s capitol as we debate what story we want manufacturing and globalism to tell to the next generation. This work has woken up the world, and woken up Apple, because it’s a human story about something we all knew, but refused to look at. Theater has always been the voice of people gathered together—it can be a path toward illuminating the human heart, and through that light call for us all to work for change. I hope DC audiences will join us.”
When Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak came to a performance, he told The New York Times, “I will never be the same after seeing that show.” The same can be said for the way Apple does business.
