Barack Obama has hope, but Mike Daisey has the audacity to sit down just one hour prior to his one-man show, Stories from an Atlantic Night Café, and write an outline that will be his only guide when he steps on stage. Seattlest chatted with Daisey via e-mail as he made the cross-country trek from his home in Brooklyn to Seattle prior to his performance at CHAC on Sunday night.

One hour before the show? What the fuck, are you crazy?

It's the audacity of the idea that drove me to it when I first started doing them in 2004--I always feel like I have many ideas flowing through me all the time, and this form has been an exercise in a kind of metaphysical bulletproofing--by putting a gun to my head right before the performance subconscious connections are forged that don't normally occur, and the intensity of that experience connects with audiences. I also like the live wire aspect of the work--people watching know that the story is driven and created fresh right at that very moment, and will never be recreated, which is a terribly rare thing in our theater. I think I do it because I believe in the supremacy of live experiences, and I am dedicated to doing theater that justifies its existence now, in today's world, and isn't mouldering and festering 19th century warmed-over bullshit.

It is also enormously gratifying when I survive the performance.

Tell us a bit more about the connection with the audience. Do you feel like they're more invested than they would be with a "normal" theater performance, knowing about that gun pointed at your head? Are they rooting for you, in a sense?

I think it has less to do with allegiances than it does to a charged environment--the recognition that something is actually going to happen in the space that is not routinized, that isn't the byproduct of a four week rehearsal process and (often) a dead person's script.

Audience want to be surprised and subverted, upturned and unmoored from the familiar--the best theater does that, and I aspire to reach that end by dissolving the boundaries between the audience and myself. There is no script, and as little pretense as possible, and this allows a degree of honesty in the bounded space of the stage that is rarely achievable. Whatever investment audiences are willing to put in any piece of theater is an enormous responsibility--it is their time being gifted into your hands--and I think audiences want to be paid back for their time with insight, pleasure and catharsis.

In a very real way when an audience roots for me, they are rooting for themselves, because it's the sum of all of us, audience and performer together, that determines just how any given evening is going to go down.

With regards to how an evening goes down, how would you rather one doesn't go down? Can you retell an evening that bombed, or at least moments of bombery?

Do stories of failed performances ever work on their own merits? What's interesting isn't the particulars, but the growing sense of fiasco that envelops and then consumes the show and the audience alike. I always think of a show I did in Seattle, when I was still doing a lot of traditional acting in the unheated garage theaters, wherein I was directed to vigorously and nakedly masturbate in front of the audience. In the terrible silence of artless humiliation was born my serious resolution to never do other people's art that I'm not 100% on ever again, and that helped lead to the monologues. Thank you, crazy director!

Your last set of monologues dealt with the topic of "truth" and touched on, for example, James Frey's now infamous book. Should we care if what you say in your performance is true or not?

I fought much of this out at Maud Newton's blog, in a spirited exchange others may find interesting here.

I'm not the arbiter of what people should care about--that's very much each individual's choice. I do believe that I should tell the truth, because I have an obligation to fulfill the mandate I've established--and though my imagination is large, it cannot compete with reality as a canvas for the stories of our lives. It is in my best interests--dramatic, moral, and practical--to tell the truth. So I don't know if individual audience members should care if I'm truthful, though I certainly do when I watch shows, but I do know that *I* should care about it in the deepest possible way--and for me, that's what matters.

More from Daisey on red-faced passion, Mark Twain, and Project Runway after the jump.

Tell us about Mark Twain.

Mark Twain (nee Samuel Clemens) was extraordinarily famous in his day, and pre-eminently as not only an author but a monologuist--he would tour the country, performing extemporaneous speaking engagements where he spoke at length, weaving his ideas against one another with both humor and pathos. His model of performance is not dissimilar from what I am doing in performance. Also interesting is that Hal Holbrook has been performing his own show, MARK TWAIN TONIGHT! for decades, and in many ways helped pave the way in the modern era for the monologuist by using the material of yesteryear to get a foothold in the theaters of the fifties and sixties. In a monumental act of endurance he has been touring with the show for almost fifty years.

Do you think storytelling is undergoing something of a resurgence in this country, or does Seattlest just hang around too many literary/McSweeney's wonks and therefore we lack perspective?

Though I love the McSweeney's folk dearly, and have spent my share of nights drinking bourbon with Hodgman, Pollack, et al, I'm certain this isn't a movement coming from the intelligentsia--the attraction of storytelling is in the way it speaks universally to the human experience, and any re-embracing we're seeing now is probably a reaction against endless deconstruction and the idea of image over story, which I think is somewhat played out.

You've mentioned that people in New York were referring to storytelling as "alternative standup" which just sounds lame and seems to miss the point entirely. However, do people look at you funny when you tell them you're a "monologuist?" It has a subtly pervert taint to it...

That's only if you use the incorrect, or as I think of it, "evil" pronunciation. It should be pronounced mono-LOG-ist, not mon-O-lo-gist, as mon-O-lo-gist sounds like gyn-O-col-o-gist, and who the hell wants to go see someone talk to them who reminds them of a gynecologist?

Some of my best friends are stand-ups in the burgeoning NYC scene, and great stand-up can tell some amazing stories--I've learned a lot from Bill Cosby's work, and Lewis Black's live performances are absolutely illuminating. There are storytelling groups I work with in New York like The Moth that do wonderful work and are getting word out about extemporaneous autobiographical performance.

We also get red in the face (and people love to comment on it directly to our red face), do you think there's something wrong with us?

It's funny--it all depends on the era you're in. Red-faced was a compliment in the 18th and 19th centuries, as it connoted speaking with passionate intensity, and it was much more damning to be "bloodless". In today's world with the prevalence of images our sense of what is proper is often dictated by stillness, and I think that makes us value too highly the glassy, immobile, perfect images that come out of our modern world. Comme-çi, comme-ça--maybe it will be in vogue again next century.

What is your take on the current obsession with reality TV? Could you say that is also a reaction against endless deconstruction and the idea of image over story?

I think it's a reaction to bad network television--too many years of recycled sound bites and stale conventions made people hungry for the looser, less predictable (when it is well done) world of reality television. I watch quite a bit of reality TV myself (Project Runway, Top Chef and America's Next Top Model are among my guilty pleasures) and I think a lot of the appeal is in trying to piece together a narrative that is real--you know what the cameras want you to see, but figuring out what the story behind the story is can be endlessly fascinating.

Can someone learn how to tell stories, or at least tell them better, or is it an innate skill best left to the Michael Jordans of monologuing?

Like anything crafted, I think the art of storytelling does depend on native skill and talent, but since it is hardwired into human consciousness anyone can tell stories--otherwise our lives wouldn't make sense to us. We need storytelling in a way we don't integrally need almost any other art form, and because of that I've found that not only can anyone be taught to do it better, it helps people in a whole host of other areas. I'm teaching a workshop while in Seattle on storytelling--anyone is welcome, and if you're interested in the form it can help people find their stories and the voices to tell them.

What question do you wish someone would ask you in an interview?

Mr. Daisey, you have a terrifying intensity onstage, but offstage you're widely regarded as a passionate sexual partner and brilliant scholar of the obscure corners of the human mind--is it difficult to balance these three very different disciplines as gifted actor, sexual dynamo, and artistic genius?

Stories from an Atlantic Night Café
7pm, Sunday February 4
CHAC's Showroom, $20 adv/$25 door