Reviewed: How Theater Failed America at Woolly Mammoth - Theater Review - Washington City Paper:
What's most powerful about How Theater Failed America, though, isn't Daisey's takedown of the gotta-build-a-building urge (which will certainly strike home for D.C. audiences who've wondered who'll fill all the new local seats) or his indictment of the creative compromises that (he argues) inevitably come with bigger budgets and broader constituencies. It's the inescapable sense that Daisey is angry about the failings of theater's biggest institutions chiefly because theater is the thing he literally can't live without.
The jokes and the jabs, you see, are mostly filler. The real meat of How Theater Failed America is a trio of movingly told, delicately shaded stories about Daisey's onstage adventures—in Seattle's fringiest venues, as a teacher coaching a half-baked high-school festival production, with a madly ambitious repertory company one glorious Maine summer—and the hushed, shadowed memory of a time when there was none of that wild invention to come between the actor and a darkness that almost claimed him. The bile and the ire and the scorn boil off when he's telling these stories, and what surfaces is...would you call it tenderness? Joy?
I would, and it's infectious—and whether your passion is theater or cars or, I dunno, cowherding—it'll remind you of everything you once thought possible and make you wonder whether it can't be possible still.
2:58 PM
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