MARK D. FEFER
Delish! Mike Daisey's one-man show about Amazon.com opens off-Broadway this weekend.
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Seattle's hottest performer is having a big opening this weekend.
It's 3,000 miles away. 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com, a one-man show featuring the sweating, bellowing, musing Mike Daisey, is going up at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York's Greenwich Village. What began last year in the Backroom of the Speakeasy Cafe in Belltown is now being staged in a 75-year-old off-Broadway theater where many of Samuel Beckett's plays had their U.S. premieres. A loose, semi-improvised string of reminiscences has been tightened and refined into a well-paced, slickly lit, and still hilarious monologue about the delusions and excesses of the Internet boom. Daisey's face currently adorns the sides of New York City pay phones and appears in small New York Times ads. Two and a half weeks of previews are behind him, and the corpulent, Chris Farley-like comic will get his formal notices from New York critics this weekend. A crowd of 90 was laughing to tears on a recent Monday night, suggesting that he will do just fine.
Sipping tea in a West Village cafe and explaining his move to New York, Daisey said, "I knew I could do the show at the Speakeasy indefinitely." (Well, except for the Speakeasy burning to the ground last May. . . . ) "But that wouldn't take it to the larger level."
Many, many songs have been written about New York City, but there's only one or two about Seattle, and the most famous of them sounds like a bad 1960s jingle. If you're an artist, it's easy to feel like this town doesn't matter and maybe you should go where everyone else goes to make it. In the last few years, plenty of Seattleites in the arts have done just that, and many others wrestle with this dilemma: Do they give up what's great about Seattle in order to challenge themselves in the cultural center of the nation? Or do they make peace with the joys of the Northwest's (relatively) thriving arts scene and agreeable quality of life? Or can they somehow combine the two?
Our cultural scene has certainly been getting dissed enough lately. Last week, Jacob Weisberg, the new editor of Slate, Microsoft's online magazine, said the publication would now be edited from New York rather than Redmond so as to be "a little closer to the action." The week before, recently departed ACT artistic director Gordon Edelstein was quoted in The New York Times suggesting that Seattle audiences, unlike New Yorkers, have a mostly upbeat and healthy outlook on life that renders them less eager to hear "disturbing news about our psyches" from the stage. (And, sadly, it seems there's not a lot of critically acclaimed plays offering really good news about our psyches.)
For his part, Daisey, 29, who moved to Brooklyn last June, sees the strengths and limitations of Seattle's cultural life as equally important to his current success. In Seattle, he says, "there's a large amount of work going on in a large number of unheated garages. People find interesting things to do with just four lights and a black backdrop. That was really valuable for me." In the five years he was here (two of which he spent rising through the ranks at Amazon), Daisey was active in the fringe theater scene, producing as well as acting in his own shows, and he started a sketch comedy group, Up in Your Grill, which got airtime on the short-lived local TV show The John Report with Bob. Seattle, says Daisey, "let me get my feet wet in a huge number of areas, more than I can imagine in any other city." The fact that Seattle is not an entertainment capital leaves its artists unbound, he says. "You're freed from commercial concerns; there's no chance that you can sell out. You do what you have to do [to earn money] during the day, then you can follow your vision at night. But it burns you out eventually." * Therein lies the conflict. Seattle is small enough and culturally lively enough that talented people can find outlets for their aspirations, but it's too small perhaps to fulfill those aspirations. It's possible to work, possible even to make a comfortable living, in the arts, but is it possible to reach your full potential? Seattle arts audiences are, for the most part, pleasant and supportive, much like Seattle sports fans (and let's not get started on that again . . . ), but they may also lack a certain critical gusto, passion in the blood. * "People are so much more likely to go to the theater here [than in Seattle]," Daisey says. "It's exponentially easier to get people to see a show. People have grown up with the theater and have a habit of going." * Daisey notes that none of the major Seattle theaters—the Rep, Intiman, ACT, or On the Boards—took any interest in his little fringe performance at the Speakeasy last year, despite invitations . . . until he moved to New York. Then two of those organizations immediately came calling. Seattle actors have long joked that the best way to find success in their hometown is to move to N.Y.C.
