Seattlest: A Dialogue with Newly Minted Playwright Mike Daisey:
Q: What's the motivation for returning to this theme of extraordinary people or extraordinary situations?
MD: Extraordinary stories give us a large canvas to see ourselves in. Ultimately, while I don’t think the play is anything as crass as allegory, I do think it’s interesting to talk allegorically about what power does to people: how it affects the decisions that people and governments make as they accumulate power, how that power shifts and warps them. It’s odd, they’re mostly unrelated works, but I was writing If You See Something, Say Something at the same time, and that's about the father of the neutron bomb, about the era of American supremacy that was born with the invention of the atomic bomb, how that radically altered our relationship to ourselves and the rest of the world, when we began to view ourselves as a superpower. In this play I’m using a fantastical landscape to address a very human questions that we all face in our lives: We all have immense power over other people in one form or another, over parents, over children, in our jobs. How we use that power says something about our humanity. So I hope a small human lesson comes out of this larger landscape.
8:12 PM
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