AFTER GOING ON a 13-city national tour, and with just seven days until the Presidential election, monologuist, actor and author Mike Daisey returned to New York for one final performance of The Trump Card.
Daisey has spent 19 years performing theatrical monologues on social themes. His career took off in 2001 when he performed 21 Dog Years, his comedic nonfiction tale of tech culture and dotcom horrors, at the New York International Fringe Festival and followed it up with a book. By 2011, it was soaring thanks to The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, an expose on deplorable working conditions in Apple’s factories in China. But everything came crashing down after his story was featured on This American Life in 2012; two months after the initial air date, TAL dedicated an entire episode to retracting the story after learning that Daisey had lied and dramatized the most moving parts of the monologue. After a cagey, almost Trumpian nonapology apology, he copped to lying in a sincere-sounding mea culpa on his blog.
Now quick to clarify that he’s an artist, not a journalist, Daisey explains what he sees as his job: “Observing my culture, seeing what it’s doing and creating theatrical commentary.”
Seated behind a wooden desk onstage, with only a glass of water and notes, Daisey appears unpretentious and nonthreatening. Then he opens his mouth. “You, my friends, are fucked.” If you expected a riotous ripping apart of the Republican nominee, prepare for a more subtle analysis of the man himself as well as the “liberal, fairly wealthy, white” audience that Daisey says helped create Trump.
The monologue explores the totality of Trump—person, performer, politician— and it changes with the news. Most days, nothing of note happens (“If Trump says something offensive, that just means it’s Tuesday,” says Daisey), but the leak of Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy” did affect the show. “It required extensive rewrites because people finally woke up to the person that Trump has been the entire time,” he says. “I want to thank whoever it was that leaked that tape. [Trump] was always a misogynist who sexually assaults women; we just didn’t see it. The election tears the veil off. The truth is that these are not normal times. The water is coming over the levees in both directions, and people don’t like it because it’s painful.”
Daisey gives us a mesmerizing show with a message: Americans, accept that there will always be Trumps. What matters is honestly looking at the voters and public who helped get him so close to the presidency. ■
Dorri Olds • The Trump Card, Town Hall, Tues, Nov. 1 at 8pm (townhall.com). $50.