Daisey's 'Last Cargo Cult' at Live Arts Festival

The Mike Daisey phenomenon is an interesting one. Daisey seeks to make monologue performance art out of stand-up comic material and his life's adventures. No doubt his one-man show, The Last Cargo Cult— presented at the Suzanne Roberts Theater to a more mainstream than Fringe audience ($30 ticket prices have their impact)— revealed a comic with a sharp political take of America's corrupting, capitalist institutions, reminiscent of Mort Sahl or of the more contemporary Michael Moore.

The popularity of Daisey's monologues— even in the Hamptons, which Daisey place-drops into his routine— may reflect the mainstreaming of lefty humor now that the Reagan and Bush regimes have rendered such humor so accessible and revitalizing to people of all suasions. (John Stewart's "Daily Show" and Steven Colbert's "Colbert Report," have ridden this same populist tide of outrage and cynicism.)

This monologue concerns a South Pacific island cargo-cult's adoration of capitalist America, a timely subject in the face America's recent self-imposed economic meltdown. (I didn't see Daisey's other Live Arts Festival monologue, How Theater Failed America, which received excoriating vitriol from some critics, like BSR's Jim Rutter and the Inquirer's Toby Zinman, and accolades from others who connected with his apparent insider critiques of contemporary theater in America.)

A friend advised me to enter the Roberts Theatre by discarding my vivid memories of Spalding Gray, the extraordinary theater artist (and my personal acquaintance of many years) who had re-invented the autobiographic monologue performance art form utilized by Daisey. But when the show began in a darkened theater, with Daisey staring out at us, seated on a chair behind an ordinary wood table, small notebook and glass of water before him—the exact minimalist setting Spalding utilized—I couldn't banish Spalding from my mind. (Although he wiped sweat from his brow all evening, Daisey never touched the water, leaving it as mere iconic decoration; in contrast, the sips of water Gray took, as he maintained his gaze at you, constituted pregnant pauses in the rhythm of his story-telling, not part of an irrelevant stage prop.)

Unlike Daisey, Gray wove his tortured neuroses and careening life into stories that conveyed the feel of wild, free association with a theatrical artistry that weighed every word, pause, intonation, gaze and split-second of timing. He understood the artistic requirements for great story telling, and consequently his live performances left his audiences in awe and wonderment.

By contrast, Daisey delivers hackneyed husband-wife car driving jokes and keeps his own psyche veiled from his story telling. Worse, he seems oblivious to the self-pity and preachy moralizing that recurs through his long evening monologue. Out on his South Pacific island of Tanna, Daisey confronts a man savagely beating his wife, and describes his own simple, silent, raised-arm gesture, which causes the man to stop beating his wife— apparently in awe of the white American who had earlier contributed his stash of blue jeans to the local village chief. The story should have ended with the silence of that arm gesture made visible on stage, but then Daisey adds fatuously, "It was easy to take that action when you are doing the right thing."

To top off the lack of imaginative language or presence of skilled stagecraft, Daisey falls into an increasingly obnoxious default mode in which he repeatedly relies on "fucking" as an adjective when his Thesaurus fails him. Laugh with Daisey on a David Letterman show if you choose. But I'd like to see him grow as a performing artist before he attempts another Festival appearance.