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Theater Review: Why Mike Daisey’s Critique of Apple Is Too Glib to Really Sting

Mike Daisey in The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, created and performed by Mike Daisey and directed by Jean-Michele Gregory, running at The Public Theater. Photo credit: Stan Barouh
Mike Daisey in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

I write this review on a machine masterminded and commissioned by Steve Jobs, a machine that is, as I type, connected to another machine masterminded and commissioned by Steve Jobs, in an apartment where Steve Jobs holds patents on just about every object any self-respecting burglar would bother burgling. Even in death, the man circumscribes my life. I am, in other words, not unlike the monologist Mike Daisey: A middle-class, under-50, Brooklyn-dwelling consumer of vaguely virtuous-seeming hipware. I don’t shop around too much for my personal electronics. My default setting is Jobs, the man who more or less invented the concept of “personal electronics” — I’m just another dues-paying layperson in the church of Apple.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is at the Public Theater through November 13.

Theater Review: Why Mike Daisey’s Critique of Apple Is Too Glib to Really Sting