With the theater increasingly seen as a passé art form, it’s exciting to think it important enough to have any impact on America at all. But in his new performance piece, How Theater Failed America, baby-faced, burly monologuist Mike Daisey discusses drama’s deleterious impact on those who produce it. Created with his collaborator (and wife), Jean-Michele Gregory, Daisey’s screed attacks nonprofit theaters—theaters not too dissimilar from the Public, which hosts him. In his polemic, he calls for braver play choices, lower ticket prices, and the hiring of local actors. Meanwhile, he attacks any “specious whining” that blames theater’s declining popularity on “television, iPods, Reagan, the NEA, short attention spans, and the folly of youth.”
Mon., April 14, 7 p.m., 2008