A Dialogue with Newly Minted Playwright Mike Daisey

Why did you decide to write a play, instead of a monologue?

MD: You know, a lot of my monologues are about esoteric research, and I’d been researching the Soviet space program for some time. At first I suspected that it might be a monologue, but it became clear to me that I wanted something more. I wanted permission to write something fantastical, something that is not true. Much of my work is autobiographical and non-fiction, and I wanted to work in fiction, to have the ability to make things up.

And this was an idea that I didn’t think would express itself well as a monologue. Monologues work primarily through creating intricate chains of logic, alternating back and forth between tragedy and comedy, and they’re very good at many things, but what they are very bad at are the things that traditional theater is very good at, namely, putting human beings in a space who are in conflict with one another, and then watching those conflicts resolve, watch them subvert and control one another in this theatrical space.

Was the creative process different, writing a play? And how did it end up at Annex?

MD: It’s very different from creating a monologue—my monologues are not scripted. I’ve written articles and books, but this is actually the most writing I’ve ever done, putting these people onstage. It was created at the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab; every year they invite five or six playwrights and they sort of workshop the play. They took me, which was very gracious of them because I had no other plays. I worked on it all of last fall and this spring. Then it culminated in a staged reading here in New York. I sent out an announcement about that, which is when Annex heard about it and asked me to send the script to them, which I did, and they asked to produce it.

I had a number of different theaters throughout the country show interest in the script, to premiere it, but I let Annex take the first crack at it because they were so high to do it. They were so enthusiastic about it, I couldn’t say no. I worked with Annex…god, years and years ago now. I’m familiar with those guys, and I wanted to foster connections between the work I’m doing and where they sit—which I think is a very fascinating place—in Seattle’s theater hierarchy. I think they have a really admirable mission, developing tons of new work each year, and they do it with almost no resources.

I've enjoyed sitting in on rehearsals, putting on a playwright hat. Pretending to be a playwright mostly involves listening from the back of the room as other people do stuff onstage. It’s a strange role because it’s not really a role at all. If you’re in a production, if you’re a director, you’re needed there every day. A playwright isn’t really needed, so it’s like, “Show up if you like…or don’t…” But for me it was very valuable to watch the piece get mounted, to hear how it plays out in space. As a monologist it was easy for me to just listen. I didn’t write the play with me in mind at all, I never intended to inhabit the play as a performer. I’d always seen it as something other people were going to put on. It’s technically challenging, so I was curious to see how they would tackle the play’s challenges on a shoestring budget. It has a number of extraordinary effects. They’re not necessarily expensive but they’re logistically complicated.

What's the motivation for returning to this theme of extraordinary people or extraordinary situations?

MD: Extraordinary stories give us a large canvas to see ourselves in. Ultimately, while I don’t think the play is anything as crass as allegory, I do think it’s interesting to talk allegorically about what power does to people: how it affects the decisions that people and governments make as they accumulate power, how that power shifts and warps them. It’s odd, they’re mostly unrelated works, but I was writing If You See Something, Say Something at the same time, and that's about the father of the neutron bomb, about the era of American supremacy that was born with the invention of the atomic bomb, how that radically altered our relationship to ourselves and the rest of the world, when we began to view ourselves as a superpower. In this play I’m using a fantastical landscape to address a very human questions that we all face in our lives: We all have immense power over other people in one form or another, over parents, over children, in our jobs. How we use that power says something about our humanity. So I hope a small human lesson comes out of this larger landscape.