The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Berkeley, Calif.

(510) 647-2949

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“It’s not going to be as easy as you might think” for Apple executives to dismiss the message of this new one-man show, said Philip Elmer-DeWitt in Fortune. True, creator and star Mike Daisey is “hardly a household name,” and it’s no great feat that he found an audience for his critique of the tech giant in Berkeley, Calif. But the seasoned and well-regarded monologuist has “a good story to tell” about shocking working conditions at the Chinese plant that produces Apple’s iPhones and iPads: A distressing report about his recent visit to Shenzhen, China, supplies the climax to his account of the “rise and fall and rise again” of longtime Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “It would be a mistake to underestimate the power of the meme—the mental seed—that he is planting” in the minds of Apple’s loyal customer base.

It might seem a surprise that Daisey is himself “a self-professed Apple devotee,” said Karen D’Souza in the San Jose Mercury News. Yet only “a true believer” in the “Cult of Mac” could be as heartbroken as Daisey is to learn that “the gadgets he adores” are products of others’ misery. Inside the manufacturing complex known as Foxconn City, he “found himself deluged with hair-raising tales” of deaths, amputations, and workers as young as 12 pulling 14-hour shifts. His monologue tends to jump too much between those stories and benign anecdotes about Jobs, but “his ability to fuse snarkiness with sociological insight” is impressive. Without pontificating, he forces the audience to “take a hard look at the glowing screens in their pockets and ask where they came from and at what cost.”