Victory Gardens Fresh Squeezed will host internationally acclaimed storyteller Mike Daisey in his raucous return to Chicago to perform two consecutive local premieres of his most recent - and most talked-about - one-man shows: How Theater Failed America, April 26-May 2, 2010, and The Last Cargo Cult, May 5-9, 2010, at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago.
Tickets go on sale Tuesday, December 22 at noon for Mike Daisey's controversial monologue How Theater Failed America, April 26-May 1 in the intimate Victory Gardens Biograph studio theater. Immediately following, May 3-May 9, also in the Victory Gardens Biograph studio, Daisey segues into performances of his newest work, The Last Cargo Cult, which just enjoyed a smash hit world premiere run at New York's Public Theatre.
If the golden age masters of stand-up comedy had a one-night stand with the irreverent liberal pundits of today, their love child might have been monologist Mike Daisey. Hailed by the New York Times as a "master storyteller…one of the finest solo performers of his generation," Daisey humorously beats sense into the bumbling pace of post-modern America with wit woven tighter than Betsy Ross's Stars and Bars.
In How Theater Failed America, Daisey sinks his razor-sharp wit into a subject he knows well: the American theater, from the sublimely crass to the genuinely ugly. From gorgeous new theaters standing empty as cathedrals, to "successful" working actors traveling like migrant farmhands, to an arts culture unwilling to speak or listen to its own nation, Daisey takes stock of the dystopian state of theater in America: a shrinking world with smaller audiences every year. Fearlessly implicating himself and the system he works within, Daisey seeks answers to essential and dangerous questions about the art we're making, the legacy we leave the future, and who it is we believe we're speaking to.
Following How Theater Failed America, Daisey will segue into his second week at the Victory Gardens Biograph with the Chicago premiere of The Last Cargo Cult. In his latest work, Daisey divulges the true-life story of his time on a remote South Pacific island whose inhabitants worship America at the base of a constantly erupting volcano. Their religion is explored alongside our own to form a sharp and searing examination of the international financial crisis. Daisey wrestles with the largest questions of what the collapse means, and what it says about our deepest values. Part adventure story and part memoir, he uses each culture to illuminate the other to find, between the seemingly primitive and the achingly modern, a human answer.
In its review of The Last Cargo Cult, which enjoyed a wildly successful run earlier this month at New York's Public Theatre, the New York Times reconfirmed Mike Daisey is "one of the elite performers in the American theater", adding, "with an effortlessness that comes from years of spinning tales, he imbues this uneventful trip with the punch of the first explosion of an action movie."
Over the past decade, Mike Daisey has performed his unique extemporaneous monologues at venues such as the Public Theater, American Repertory Theatre, the Spoleto Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Cherry Lane Theatre, Yale Repertory Theater, the Noorderzon Festival, Portland Center Stage, Intiman, Performance Space 122, and many more. He's been a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman, his work has been heard on the BBC, NPR and the National Lampoon Radio Hour, and his groundbreaking series All Stories Are Fiction is available through Audible. Currently he's a commentator for PRI's Studio 360 and NPR's Day To Day, a contributor to WIRED, Slate and Salon, a web contributor to Vanity Fair and Radar Magazine, and his writing appears in the anthology The Best Tech Writing 2006. His first film, Layover, is being distributed by Lars von Trier's company Zentropa, and he stars in the Lawrence Krauser feature Horrible Child. His first book, 21 Dog Years: A Cubedweller's Tale, was published by the Free Press and he is working on a second book, Great Men of Genius, adapted from his monologues about genius and megalomania in the lives of Bertolt Brecht, P.T. Barnum, Nikola Tesla, and L. Ron Hubbard. He has been the recipient of the Bay Area Critics Circle Award, two Seattle Times Footlight Awards, and a MacDowell Fellowship.
Now in its second season, Victory Gardens Fresh Squeezed is a series of special events and off-beat, off-night performances aimed to attract new, more diverse audiences while celebrating alternative voices and approaches to creating new work.
Tickets are $25 for each show; or a discounted rate of $40 for both shows when purchased together. For tickets and information, call the Victory Gardens box office, 773-871-3000, or purchase tickets online at victorygardens.org.