iPhone Buyers Remorse: The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs Review

Whatever discomfort you may feel about Mike Daisey’s pokes at Steve Jobs so soon after the Apple founder’s death cannot compare to the queasiness at the horrors this chronicler of the digital age reveals in “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”

It is not an uneasiness that extends to the show itself, a monologue that is as hilariously entertaining as it is pointed and thought provoking.

Daisey, who came to prominence from his 2001 monologue, “21 Dog Years,” about his experience as an employee of Amazon.com, is a technology-lover speaking to other technology-lovers, not hard to find in an era that seems to praise little else. Much of the humor comes in that rapport between geek speaker — who says he worshiped Apple, and by extension Steve Jobs — and a geek audience that no longer feels they can do without Apple products. (“I never knew I needed a laptop so thin I could slice a pastrami sandwich with it. But then I saw it and I wanted it.”)

That makes Daisey’s indictment all the more powerful:
“I started to think, and that’s always a problem for any religion,” he says.

The heart of his monologue is about his trip to the Chinese city of Shenzhen, where Apple’s laptops, smart phones, and tablets — and more than half of all electronic devices made by all manufacturers in the world, Daisey says — are put together by hundreds of thousands of employees of Foxconn Technology Group. He spoke to a long line of such employees, who told him of conditions so horrendous that there are regular suicides. Workers as young as 12 years old live in barracks, and are forced into shifts routinely as long as 16 hours; one worker, he says, died after a 34-hour shift. Some suffer nerve damage both from the repetitive motion of their assembly-line work and from the chemicals used in the manufacturing process. Employees who try to organize into unions to improve conditions are put in jail and blacklisted from employment.

“Do you really think Apple doesn’t know?” Daisey says.

Daisey intersperses tales from his trip to China with memories of his own infatuation with technology, and various stories about Steve Jobs that illustrate what Daisey calls the two sides of the man – that of “visionary” and of “asshole,” a ruthless businessman. Jobs himself, Daisey says, divided the world into “geniuses and bozos” — the latter of which, Daisey implies, included all his customers, which was why he felt free to impose “forced upgrades”; he stopped production of the immensely popular iPod mini, and replaced it with the Nano, which carries fewer songs.

Shortly after Jobs’s death earlier this month, Daisey, who has been performing “The Agony and the Ecstasy” for some time now around the country, wrote an Op-Ed about Jobs summing up in print the main points in his monologue, and retelling some of the stories.

Daisey is a vivid writer, but it’s in performance that he is most in his element, combining the spirit of the late monologist Spalding Gray, the journalist gadfly Michael Moore, and any number of fat (and/or) screaming comic performers… John Belushi, Jack Black, Sam Kinison, Jonah Hill. On stage during the show, Daisey calls himself an actor several times, but he does not do characters in the way of, say, Whoopi Goldberg or Lily Tomlin; his jowly face is expressive, but his range is limited. He is a storyteller more than an actor. Yet, surely with the help of his director Jean-Michele Gregory, who is also his wife, Daisey somehow manages, in what is almost an inexplicable act of alchemy, to make his storytelling into a satisfying theatrical experience.

In front of Seth Reiser‘s simple set of occasionally blinking lights, Daisey has nothing but a glass-topped desk, a glass of water, a cloth he frequently uses to wipe the sweat off his face, and a stack of loose paper, presumably with notes to remind him of the order of his monologue, though he doesn’t seem ever to read from it. He does turn the page at regular intervals. Near the end of this two hour show, which is performed without intermission, I started looking at how many pages he had left. “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” could have used some trimming. His riff against PowerPoint, for example, is completely hilarious and a digression that he could have saved for a future monologue.

As we leave the theater, we are handed a sheet of paper entitled What Happens Next, that offers four suggestions for action:
You can Speak to Apple, in which Daisey gives the e-mail address of Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook (tcook@apple.com; “don’t abuse this email address. Be firm, polite…”) “Cook made his name in Apple by establishing Apple’s supply chain in Southern China…”
He makes reference on this sheet (as he does not in his show) to Apple’s report on the conditions, which Daisey dismisses.
You can Think Different About Upgrading — meaning he doesn’t think we should do so as often.
You Can Connect and Educate Yourself, and supplies the websites China Labor Watch and SACOM. (A telling comment on the first website backs up one of Daisey’s points, that Jobs could have done something about the workers’ conditions, but chose not to: “…he left behind a supply chain that still lacks an effective supervising system that would allow for its factories to improve labor conditions…China Labor Watch had attempted to correspond with Steve Jobs and Apple numerous times but had never received any sort of response.”)
You Can Tell Others
That is what Mike Daisey is doing – and very well indeed.

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The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs
New York Public Theater
Created and performed by Mike Daisey; directed by Jean-Michele Gregory; sets and lighting by Seth Reiser
Running time: Two hours without intermission
Ticket prices: $75.00 – $85.00
The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is set to run through December 4