Mike Daisey's How Theater Failed America and how to have artist-critic discourse

Monologuist Mike Daisey, who last appeared here in October 2008 at the MCA, is back in town with the long-overdue Chicago debut of the monologue he wasn't performing at the MCA but that everyone was talking about anyway. How Theater Failed America is Daisey's passionate, thoughtful, very funny treatise on both the power of theater and the shortcomings in the way we practice it in this country, arguing that we tend to value the institution over employees and real estate over real artists; it runs through Sunday 2 in Victory Gardens's Richard Christiansen studio space (which, given Daisey's hilarious characterization of "the studio space" in the monologue itself, becomes kind of a mindblowing auto-commentary). Though it can get a bit inside-baseball for theater practitioners—I wish I could buy a ticket for every artistic director and executive director in town—it's not to be missed for anyone who cares about theater as an art form or a business.

Daisey's monologues aren't set; he performs extemporaneously from an outline. At Monday night's opening, after a gag about how regional theaters call him in as a replacement when their indispensable re-imaginings of Pericles go off the rails, he went off on a tangent just for us about Neil LaBute's new scenes for Chicago Shakespeare Theater's The Taming of the Shrew: "They told me when I got to town, and I thought, you're shitting me," Daisey said. "That's even better than my Pericles joke!"

I don't know if Daisey knew then that LaBute had spent much of the past week engaging in an increasingly ridiculous flame war over TOC's Shrew review (Chicago Shakespeare hasn't responded to a request for comment). But he does now—he referred to it this afternoon, in a post on his own site, as "an unfortunate series of posts that capture exactly why" artists should be careful when responding to critics. Daisey does so in the course of his own response to Chris Jones's Tribune review of HTFA. (Man, can this get any more meta?) Jones gives the monologue a favorable review, but engages in a bit of "Chicago's not like that" defensive talk about how most of our theaters cast locally and love ensembles, and a seemingly contradictory defense of out-of-town star casting based on box office receipts.

While there's some truth to Jones's point about Chicago's many ensemble-based theaters, many of our largest institutions don't work on that model, and even ensembles can see strife. We're by no means exempt from the troubles pointed out in HTFA, and Daisey's response indicates he's no Chicago dilettante; he cites last year's breakup between American Theater Company and American Blues Theater, as well as the 2006 fallout from actor Jay Whittaker's public complaint about actor pay, as two local examples. And as long as we're all having this healthy dialogue, here's my favorite quote from Jones's review: "There's no question that some of America's regional theaters…have become overly enamored with national prestige at the expense of being relevant to the place in which they find themselves." Given that Jones has jetted to New York to review eight Broadway shows this month alone, I guess he knows something about that phenomenon.

Speaking of dialogues, Thursday night's performance will be followed by a panel discussion with Goodman Theatre executive director Roche Schulfer, Steppenwolf ensemble member Amy Morton, Writers' Theatre artistic director Michael Halberstam, Congo Square artistic director Ann Joseph, and actors Janet Ulrich Brooks, Patrick Andrews and Anish Jethmalani. Sunday's performance will be followed by a panel with Victory Gardens artistic director Dennis Zacek, Chicago Dramatists managing director Brian Loevner, TimeLine Theatre's Nick Bowling, Silk Road Theatre Project artistic director Jamil Khoury, American Theater Company artistic director PJ Paparelli, Collaboraction artistic director Anthony Mosely, playwright and performer Tanya Saracho and Strawdog company member Jen Avery.