Is live theater still relevant in a society where computer users can create high-quality video and distribute it almost instantly via the web? That's been the subject of an ongoing, rancorous debate between two Seattlest contributors, Jeremy and Charles, both former theater artists. Jeremy maintains the theater can yet be a powerful art form -- Charles feels it's a dying, irrelevant medium (most likely wounded by its own hand). To stir them up appropriately, the......

Mike Daisey has been in town performing his notorious Monopoly, a controversial monologue exploring the excesses of American capitalism (particularly of the Wal-Mart variety). But this weekend, Daisey turns his withering gaze on the theatre itself, with How Theater Failed America at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. Daisey takes aim at the theater for its manifold failures: its pretentions, its disconnect from the world around it, its self-satisfaction. (Check out a five-minute sample over at......

Monologuist and fascinating human being Mike Daisey arrives in town next week for a Jan 18 - Feb 3 run of his show Monopoly! at CHAC, followed by a shorter try-out of his newest piece, How Theater Failed America. We got Daisey on the horn the other day and took a walk down memory lane with him, a la Dick Cavett, to soften him up before surprising him with hard-hitting questions about how many pictures......