Monologist Mike Daisey made a lot of people angry by filling out his entertaining and damning "The Agony And The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" with lies.
The first-person expose of FoxConn -- the factory in Shenzhen, China where Apple (and many other) products are made in verifiably awful conditions -- included fabulations about child employees, maimed limbs and guns, all of which Daisey didn't see but claimed to see and later said he may as well have seen because they're probably there, which should have made saying he saw them OK. Perhaps no entity was more convinced that what Daisey did was not OK than the media, where the crime of inventing details to make a story more persuasive is a career-ender.
Which is probably why Daisey is sending personal emails to journalists to make sure they come to the new and improved "The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Steve Jobs." Daisey's re-staging, which starts a run next week at its original home, D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, is scrubbed of the 6 minutes of material that failed a fact-check by NPR reporter Rob Schmitz. In place are 12 new minutes, some of which directly address the fall-out after Schmitz publicized his findings in a very painful "This American Life" episode.
Writing in The Washington City Paper, Chris Klimek, who has been faithfully documenting Daisey's story, gave a rundown of media critics with at least one Daisey-served invite:
"I'd already heard from my friend Rachel Manteuffel at the Washington Post...that Daisey reached out to her today to offer tickets, before the Post's Erik Wemple posted this, saying that he and Reuters' Jack Shafer had both received invitations from Daisey, too."
(Manteuffel, Wemple and Shafer, by the way, were all vocal Daisey detractors.)
Daisey has already performed the revised version of the show, at the HighTide Festival in Suffolk, England, and at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., largely earning the kind of rave reviews he used to inspire without fail. One, published in Charleston's local Post and Courier, manages to cast Daisey's transgression as both not worth mentioning, and the greatest gift any citizen of the world could give (read it: it's amazing).
Klimek adds that he e-mailed Daisey for a list of the journalists he's invited so far. Daisey didn't bite, but he did extend one more invite, which Klimek said he's "definitely" accepting.