Hello All,
Leap day is upon us--the rarest day on the calendar, which has no psychic or mythological significance attached to it beyond the need to make all our heavenly accounting books come out balanced. I've always thought that it should mean something, this day that only surfaces occasionally--it should be a night when the walls between worlds are thin, when the fates are shaken loose, when we can hear the rumbling bellows of the afterlife all around us. There should be a celebration, once every four years--masqued balls of exquisite complexity, where no one is allowed to speak, especially not to the lover they bring with them.
Something like that.
It's appropriate that I'm writing to let you know that I have a brand-new monologue that touches on the creepy and arcane, which is opening in Maine, the land of my youth. I'll be in residence at Portland Stage Company creating BARRING THE UNFORESEEN, a show about ghosts, ghost stories and the reasons we tell them, 19th century spiritualism, H.P. Lovecraft and the unspeakable dread lurking under your bed. It plays from March 6th to the 15th, and full details as well as tickets can be found here.
At the end of the month I will be doing a show in the opposite environment--Orange County, California, which I only know from a hideous television program about its "real housewives". I can only pray some of them come to see MONOPOLY! at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on March 28th and 29th, as I will dedicate my performance to Vicki, who is my favorite for her sassy attitude and obsessive compulsive disorder. Tickets and details can be found here.
Finally I'll be offering my intensive on storytelling and extemporaneous autobiographical performance on April 5th and 6th. It's a two day workshop and fills up very quickly, so if you're interested in participating contact me right away for details at dilettante at mikedaisey dot com.
Be seeing you,
md
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Barring the Unforeseen
A New Monologue, Created and Performed by Mike Daisey
Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory
Maine native Mike Daisey returns to his roots in BARRING THE UNFORESEEN, a monologue told from a vast and unknowable northern province called childhood. Woven together from Maine ghost stories, the history of 19th century spiritualism, H.P. Lovecraft, and the unspeakable dread lurking under your bed, Daisey creates a monologue about why we tell ghost stories, and the precious, terrifying gifts they bring us. Unsettling and inquisitive, BARRING THE UNFORESEEN takes a long walk into the dark, on a journey with a daring audience to come back with answers.
"The master storyteller...one of the finest solo performers of his generation."
NEW YORK TIMES
"Just once, it'd be nice to see Mike Daisey and Garrison Keillor trade places, not so much to hear Keillor's nostalgically mellow take on Daisey's world, but to see Daisey rip the lid off Lake Wobegon and expose its wicked underbelly. Daisey is a mesmerizing performer who spins words into comic and emotional gold, revealing as much about himself as the subjects he is discussing."
OAKLAND TRIBUNE
"Sharp-witted, passionately delivered talk about matters both small and huge, at once utterly individual and achingly universal."
BOSTON GLOBE
"Daisey's skill is that he is able to talk about the historical and make it human, the personal and make it universal, so that the listener is both informed and transformed."
PAPER MAGAZINE
"Comic delivery so sharp it draws blood."
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
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