MIKE DAISEY has been hailed
as “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his
generation” by The New York Times, is
the preeminent monologist in the American theater today. He has been compared
to a modern-day Mark Twain and a latter-day Orson Welles for his provocative
monologues that combine the political and the personal, weaving together secret
histories with hilarity and heart. He’s known for art that reinvents the form,
like his critically acclaimed 29-night
live theatrical novel, All the Faces of
the Moon, a forty hour performance staged at the Public Theater in New York
City.
He has toured across
five continents, ranging from remote islands in the South Pacific to the Sydney
Opera House to abandoned theaters in post-Communist Tajikistan. He’s been a
guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, the Late Show with David
Letterman, a longtime host and storyteller with The Moth, as well as a commentator and contributor to The New
York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, Newsweek, WIRED, Vanity Fair, Slate,
Salon, NPR and the BBC. In a brief, meteoric career with This American Life, his appearances are
among the most listened to and downloaded episodes of that program’s history. He
has been nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award, two Drama League Awards,
and is the recipient of the Bay Area Critics Circle Award, six Seattle Times
Footlight Awards, the Sloan Foundation’s Galileo Prize, and a MacDowell
Fellowship.
As a playwright, his transcript of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve
Jobs was downloaded over 100,000 times in the first week it was made
available. Under a revolutionary open license it has seen more than 150
productions around the world and been translated into six languages. Years
later there are productions being staged all over the world every night from in
Germany to Sao Paolo to mainland China.
He is currently at
work on his second book, Here at the End
of Empire, which will be published by Simon and Schuster, and a full-length thirty hour theatrical monologue adaptation of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
You can find him on the web at mikedaisey.com, which is where you are now, and listen to
his free podcast All Stories Are Fiction, where you can hear many of his
stories, on Soundcloud or at iTunes.
