UPDATE (25 March): At his Web site today, Mike Daisey offers several comments, including these:
It made me reflect upon how lucky I have been to call the theater my home all these years, the only place I can imagine this kind of discourse happening. It made me grateful for the great privilege it has been to be able to call myself a storyteller and to have audiences come and listen to what I have to say, to extend their trust to me. I am sorry I was careless with that trust. For this, I would like to apologize to my audiences.
And I would like to apologize to my colleagues in the theater, especially those who work in non-fiction and documentary fields. What you do is essential to our civic discourse. If I have made your path more difficult, or the truth of your work harder for audiences to discern, I am sorry.
I would also like to apologize to the journalists I gave interviews to in which I exaggerated my own experiences. In my drive to tell this story and have it be heard, I lost my grounding. Things came out of my mouth that just weren’t true, and over time, I couldn’t even hear the difference myself.
To human rights advocates and those who have been doing the hard work of bringing attention to these kinds of labor issues for years, if my failures have made your jobs harder, I apologize. If I had done my job properly, with the skills I have honed for years, I could have avoided this. Instead, I blinded myself, and lost sight of the people I wanted most to help.
His full comments are here.
On 22 March, the Public Theater hosted a panel discussion arranged and led by Time Out New York theatre reviewer Adam Feldman on the Daisey affair; participants were writer-director Steven Cosson of the Civilians, playwright-performers Jessica Blank and Taylor Mac, and critic-reporters Peter Marks (Washington Post) and Jason Zinoman (The New York Times). It is an excellent examination of many of the issues that arise from the affair, and comments from Ms. Blank, Mr. Zinoman, and the Public Theater’s artistic director Oskar Eustis are especially important. You can hear the full discussion by clicking on the play button below; the podcast also appears on the 2AMt site, where it was first published. (The demand for the recording is placing some heavy demands on the servers; patience may be required.)
A beautiful discussion – very tense.
I’m not sure what is gained by evoking the Human Rights organisations constantly within the forum. It’s an undefeatable argument (you can hear everyone’s silence), but however heroic these people might be, they should know that the situation sometimes calls for a loud mouthpiece. Their work is naturally behind the scenes.
The forum perfectly illustrates everything that is happening here and what’s at stake, except that at know point does anyone question the integrity of journalism. The artist (Taylor Mac) is answerable for so many questions, the journalist none.
This was telling for me (coming from I think Taylor Mac): “did Mike Daisey’s piece ask questions? Or did it provide periods and exclamation points. Did we leave the theatre questioning the world? Or did we leave with more answers. Personally I left with more questions and being inspired to find things out for myself… I was inspired to go to china… I wanted to find things out for myself, and that’s what theatre is supposed to do. If we go to the theatre to find out the facts… I’m not sure I’m interested in the theatre.”
Just one of many critical points in the forum, all of which are worth discussing. Actually, I’ll post a few of them as I took some notes while I was listening. (Hope this is ok, George). I’m not sure who said what, and some of it is paraphrased. It’s not representative and just what I was interested in.
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Taylor Mac: “You will do whatever you can to make their experiences feel valid”. “I haven’t found anyone who has agreed with me on this”.
Volunteers for human rights organizations “This piece undermines their work”
“I’m genuinely torn – when you’re dealing with big issues, does it mean that you are no longer allowed to write a dramatic way, the same way you would write about any other issue?”
Ms. Blank “I’m making something from their stories that don’t belong to me… this brings a responsibility”
“I think there are some weird parallels between Steve Jobs and Mike Daisey because they both make beautiful things.”
“Often when you are working with real life, (…) often it doesn’t fit.” “It is not convenient. It does not fit into drama.” “I encounter greater complexity in real life” “create a certain dissonance with the audience because their expectations are confounded or sometimes disappointed and audience members will be life “what is your point of view?”” There is something in this backlash… part of what makes this so powerful was how dramatic and profound and moving those stories are and they were extra profound because you were convinced they were real”… “Daisy put himself in the centre of that issue and that doesn’t happen very often for an artist and that built a lot of bridges which if they aren’t burnt, are smoking”
“we’re going to starve out some of the beautiful things about this genre” (‘storytelling’)
Taylor Mac: “I’m second-guessing myself which is terrible for an artist, it kills creativity.”
Taylor Mac: “He’ll (Daisey) use his tools to make people trust him again, and then he’ll lie to them again” “we all lie to people every single day”
(If we demonise him) “we lose an opportunity for him to tell us where we go from here, and I don’t think he’s lost the authority to do that.” “from Georgetown I took a feeling that he was trying to understand what he has done”