As I write this, I have now seen Mike Daisey do 8 of the 18 consecutive chapters in his A People’s History. I’ve written a dispatch about each (which you can read here), and I’ll be covering all the rest through to the end.
As much as I have been knocked out by Daisey’s hilarious and trenchant material—which is about America’s history and his own—I have been marveling at his command of it. Each 90-minute show is different and unscripted. He improvises from handwritten notes on the table in front of him that he scarcely glances at. Now and then he’ll pick up a page to read aloud from a historical source, quoting from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. But for the most part he seems to be winging it, giving an inimitable in-the-moment performance that grabs you from lights up and doesn’t let go till “Thank you and good night.”
Just before the Capital Fringe run, Daisey and I met for coffee at a Busboys and Poets, and I plied him with questions about what would be the themes and content of A People’s History (you can read that interview here). What follows is the behind-the-scenes story that Daisey shared with me—his explanation about how in practice as a theater craftsperson he manages such a herculean performance.
John: We’re talking the day before Trump’s Fourth of July “Salute to America,” and it seems to me that every one of your big themes just got weightier.
Mike: Every time I’ve done the show, the themes have been intensified. The relationship between the work, which is actually about history, and the present moment keeps getting keener. It was strong at the Guthrie in Minneapolis, in March of 2018. It was stronger at Seattle Rep, in October of 2018. And now it feels so strong, it starts to feel on the nose. You start to have that artistic fear that you are no longer artistically modulating something; you’re just literally saying the thing, because it’s gotten so strong.
What have you learned from those runs that you’re bringing to DC?
At the Guthrie, I learned the show was performable. I mean, the first thing you learn is that it can actually be done, because when you’re dealing with theatrical constructs on this scale, it isn’t actually intuitively clear that it will work the way that I would like it to work.
I’ve done a show that’s even larger than this show a couple of years before that, All the Faces of the Moon. That is actually a 29-night show that runs like 44 hours. So I knew just in terms of durational scale it was possible, but I didn’t know if I was going to be happy with the mixing of narrative story and using first-person quoting from text in the show. I wasn’t sure how those elements were going to lay next to each other. I also hadn’t decided what goes into each of the 18 nights because it’s not matched up to Zinn’s exact chapters. There’s like an alchemy, and so I made a roadmap.
The second run, at Seattle Rep, I feel like I learned there’s a lot of refining, there’s some editing. I walked myself into some problems narratively in about the middle of the show, and I was able to untangle some of those.
Then from the third set of performances, which was the following month at Seattle, what I learned was, there is no optimization. You don’t get anything extra in terms of the performativeness of the piece for having just done it.
There was part of me that wondered if I did two next to each other, if I did it twice, if it would be easier the second time through. It is not. Because whenever you do one of the episodes, it has been 30 hours of experiential stage time since you last spoke those words, so nothing is gained.
How do you prepare for a performance, and how do you do two shows a day?
Well first, before the run starts, and this is going to happen tomorrow on the Fourth of July for me, I will review all the shows that will be performed until the next time there’s a full day off. So in this case, Monday is off, so I’ll have to review five shows. So tomorrow on the day off, when there’s actually a little space, that’s when I look through all the notes, and make a rough sketch of if there are major architectural changes that are going to happen with the story. I sort of get it back into my blood, try to remember it, but most of the work is on the day of each show.
On a day when a show is at 8:00 at night, I get up in the morning and I have kind of an intense morning, because I know by about 11 a.m, I will not be able to do anything else. So around 11:00, 11:30, I start working on the show, I listen to a recording of the show from the past, I listen to them sped up, so that my pitch is shifted, so I don’t have the dislocating effect of hearing my own voice excessively, it doesn’t sound like me anymore. And I review my notes again for that night, for that next performance, while listening to it, and I make additional notes, and then I just listen all the way through, and then once that’s in me, I then work through the outline a third time.
It takes roughly four to five hours to prep one of the monologues. On days when there are two shows, I have to get up at dawn and I do them in reverse order, I actually start by prepping the second one, because then I have to prep the first one and then in between the two shows, there isn’t literally enough time chronologically. So I have to have done some of the prep in the morning, and then I like pick it back up again. And that’s how it works. The doubles are fierce. The doubles are just about the hardest thing I’ve done in my career, and this weekend I’ll be doing what I call a quintuple, which is a Friday, double Saturday, double Sunday. So yes I think it’s in the span of 36 hours I would have been on stage performing something like 7 hours of it, and almost all the rest of it, except for sleeping, I will be preparing for those shows.
I think of Mike Daisey right now at this moment, prepping for the performance I’ll see tonight. Eight times I’ve seen him slay it. I expect he’ll do so again. And I expect I’ll walk out afterward wondering, as I have before, how does he do that? Because truth be told, what Mike Daisey does in A People’s History as a politically conscious performing artist must be seen to be believed.
RELATED:
Why and how John Stoltenberg will cover all 18 chapters of Mike Daisey’s A People’s History
Follow John Stoltenberg’s serial coverage of Mike Daisey’s A People’s History
Thank you for this insight into the process Mr Daisey used to craft his performances. Fascinating!