"The master storyteller...one of the finest solo performers of his generation."
NEW YORK TIMES
"A charismatic performer, his shows have the insightful hostility of the best comedy."
THE NEW YORKER
"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
“Sharp-witted, passionately delivered talk about matters both small and huge, at once utterly individual and achingly universal.”
BOSTON GLOBE
"Daisey is a brainy, manic hoot, a cross between Noam Chomsky and Jack Black."
SEATTLE TIMES
"Mike Daisey does what Michael Moore once did for General Motors."
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
"The new memoir is a monologue, and Mike Daisey is its rising star."
BOSTON HERALD
"The love child of Chris Farley and Susan Sontag."
PROVIDENCE PHOENIX
"Daisey has the wry sensibility of David Sedaris."
WALL STREET JOURNAL
"He doesn't pull punches. Daisey has wreaked his own brand of havoc."
WASHINGTON POST
"His stories are sweet or strange or a bit sad with comic edging."
VILLAGE VOICE
"Between Spalding Gray and Robin Williams."
NEW YORK POST
"Mike Daisey makes storytelling sexy."
L MAGAZINE
"An American storyteller."
NEW YORK SUN
"A powerhouse…Daisey exudes honesty and has a flair for performance; these traits are present in just-right proportions for irresistible storytelling."
SF WEEKLY
"Comic delivery so sharp it draws blood."
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
"A large man of unstoppable energy, he’s a fast, inventive, exceptionally funny storyteller with crisp comic timing and an amazingly flexible voice."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
"Blessed with both an amazingly expressive face and impeccable comic timing, Daisey attacks with a ferocity that draws huge laughs out of the smallest joke, and sidesplitting banshee howls out of the big jokes."
PORTLAND MERCURY
"Jackie Gleason meets Kafka."
TONY TACCONE, Artistic Director of Berkeley Repertory Theater
ABOUT INVINCIBLE SUMMER
"What distinguishes him from most solo performers is how elegantly he blends personal stories, historical digressions and philosophical ruminations. He has the curiosity of a highly literate dilettante and a preoccupation with alternative histories, secrets large and small, and the fuzzy line where truth and fiction blur. Mr. Daisey’s greatest subject is himself."
NEW YORK TIMES
“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
“He has a knack for detailed descriptions and keen observations ... His stories are often raucously funny, but the solo performer also probes more intense and painful subjects in a compelling manner ... and isn't afraid of expressing some of his own less-than-politically-correct emotions.”
THEATERMANIA
"Daisey radiates heat like the fiery orb of New York’s dreaded summer sun. His delivery can be acerbic, his voice and inflection taking on a distinct Lewis Black edge; in his calmer moments, Daisey sounds more like Garrison Keillor, as he zeroes in - implacably, with perfect deadpan control of his colorful vocabulary - on his pitch-perfect payoffs."
EDGE BOSTON
"The monologist's show pulses forward with Daisey sitting simply at a desk offering existential glimpses that are anything but simple."
WGBH BOSTON
"Invincible Summer is ostensibly about Daisey’s life during the summer before September 11, 2001, but it also includes digressions about the dreams of cities, Polish wedding toasts, and the history of the MTA to create a story that is bigger, messier, and far more rewarding than mere autobiography. Half the fun of Mike Daisey is watching him spin out a tangle of ideas and wondering how he’ll lasso them into a coherent story. He works from an outline, not a script, and he free-forms the words in each performance, a method that gives him the loose spontaneity of great standup and the kinetic force to fill a room as large as the Public Theater. This performance style has earned him a reputation as one of the best storytellers working today, and a legion of avid fans...Daisey certainly has the talent and the fervor to achieve greatness.”
THE VILLAGER
"He takes seemingly incongruent topics and mixes them with personal experiences to create the dramatic equivalent of a classic cocktail: there’s a balance of strong, sweet, and sour components and a few dashes of bitters. Each night the same story emerges differently; he could be a hip-hop artist freestyling, or a Baptist preacher."
BOSTON PHOENIX
“Daisey has the journalist’s gift for the telling illustration and the convincing concrete detail.”
CHARLESTON POST AND COURIER
“Powerful and memorable . . . it takes a gifted storyteller to approach tragedy without exploiting it.”
CHARLESTON CITY PAPER
"Daisey knows what makes a story great."
METRO BOSTON
"Autobiography and commentary, scripted and spontaneous, the monologue showcases its author's performance chops and detail-rich narrative style. Daisey has a knack for pushing the boundaries of comedy and candor, with unflinchingly honest descriptions that show the performer's personal strengths and weaknesses. The result is cathartic."
BOSTONIST
ABOUT MONOPOLY!
“Relentlessly interesting . . . a brilliantly spun narrative. His show is ultimately about the messy and often unjust process of making official history. He fights back the best way he knows how—by telling even better stories.”
NEW YORK TIMES
“Daisey’s monologue is as complex as his show’s stage design—chair, table, glass of water—is simple. If Daisey’s title suggests a screed against the more bullying aspects of American capitalism, rest assured that his political points are scored with precisely aimed wit and with a marvelously understated irony.”
FINANCIAL TIMES OF LONDON
“A whirlingly comic and subversive exploration of Nikola Tesla, Wal-Mart and corporate rule.”
TIME OUT NEW YORK
“True to his form as an absolute master storyteller, Daisey’s stories are perfectly woven together. He leaves each short segment at a high point—just as you’re expecting to hear what happens next in the exciting story—moving on to continue where he left off in a different story. Daisey is incredibly smart, not just in his wealth of knowledge, but in his comedic skills as well. In predictable setups, he makes completely unexpected jokes. His gestures and expressions are enough to make people laugh even without dialogue. He furrows his brow in frustration, and he sculpts the air in front of him with his hands as if it were clay, grasping with his hands in emphasis.”
CHARLESTON CITY PAPER
ABOUT GREAT MEN OF GENIUS
Like a coked-up History Channel biography, Mike Daisey’s new "bio-logues" ruminate on brilliant men and their piteous pitfalls, interspersed with Daisey’s personal experiences. Each night explores a new subject, from Bertolt Brecht to L. Ron Hubbard—it’s like hearing a lecture by your favorite professor while drinking beer in a comfortable lounge chair. You might even walk away smarter than before.
VILLAGE VOICE
Engaging and funny, Mike Daisey's monologues brim with subtle messages that never hammer you over the head...by association, he adds himself to the titular category.
TIME OUT NEW YORK
"You get the feeling that Daisey is coming to new conclusions and realizations all the time, right there on stage—that his delving into the minds of these men is never complete, and that it’s deepening before your eyes."
THE STRANGER
"An interestingly unpredictable and uneasy moosh of homage and parody...a kind of dual Rorschach test, in which one man identifies his own demons and ideals in the ink-blot of another's life story."
SEATTLE TIMES
"Daisey comes off as a kindred comic cousin to the late Saturday Night Live actor Chris Farley or maybe the precocious brother to social commentator/filmmaker Michael Moore. Each performance literally has a life of its own, as Daisey works without a script, using only a few pages of notes on yellow legal pad pages, and a towel always close at hand to wipe the sweat from his animated face."
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
ABOUT THE UGLY AMERICAN
"Daisey eschews intense characterization in favor of good old-fashioned, pure storytelling, and it’s refreshing. It makes his tale the focal point, and it makes his stories more honest and human. That’s American, and it ain’t ugly."
CHARLESTON CITY PAPER
"A hilarious, strange year abroad...with a ferocious vocabulary and a great raconteur's voice that can soar from a confidential whisper to a gored-bull bellow, Daisey gives anyone who's ever acted in anything a lot to chortle heartily at in ‘The Ugly American’."
SEATTLE TIMES
"Mike Daisey brings new life to a neglected 19th-century literary trope: the tale of the naive American trying to survive among sophisticated Europeans."
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
"As he traverses his dual lives, the story moves into the realm of professional misgivings and sexual darkness . . . the recollection leavened only by the humor and humanity of Daisey's delivery; it's to his credit that he can at once find the horror and the hidden attraction of such an uncomfortable situation. Working in the confessional mode, he treats his most intimate experiences with a candor that brings to mind the late, great Spalding Gray, an artist who regularly turned himself inside out for the sake of a story. And, like Gray, Daisey works with nothing but a table and glass of water as props, relying solely on the honesty of his subject matter to engage the audience's fascination. He's a natural born storyteller, with an exquisite sense of rhythm and an instinct for the ways in which his delivery should rise and dip according to the psychological peaks and valleys of his narrative."
SEATTLE WEEKLY
"Daisey wields a boxer's combination of grace and pummeling energy."
SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN
"It isn’t until afterward you realize the guy never moved. The magic, it turns out, is in his words and his remarkably expressive face, because you swear you’d spent a semester abroad with him in London."
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
"Daisey is a master raconteur in the tradition of Spalding Gray, capable of entrancing an audience for two hours. Daft, prescient, and eloquently delivered, the kernel of melancholy and fear at the heart of The Ugly American feels particularly powerful."
SF WEEKLY
"To describe him as ‘just sitting’ is like describing Lance Armstrong as ‘just riding’ . . . his arms and hands and face perform, subtly, wildly, expressively, as his voice whispers or roars and holds us rapt. He’s one of the best storytellers around."
PIEDMONT POST
ABOUT TRUTH:
“Elegantly woven...Engaging and intellectually curious...Mr. Daisey is rarely obvious. His stories resist easy conclusions and cheap laughs. There is nothing as simple as a thesis here, but Mr. Daisey ultimately makes a case for the importance of trying to tell the truth.”
NEW YORK TIMES
“The ethics of literature isn't typical fodder for any drama, let alone a one-man show...What helps him avoid the pitfalls of didacticism is an eye attuned to the absurdity of daily life. In assessing the story of Frey and Leroy, Daisey comes to a judgment that is strict but sympathetic; he suggests that if people are often the least reliable narrators of their own lives, they are also sometimes the most engaging.”
VARIETY
“While Daisey is unforgiving of Frey’s melodramatic style, he offers a more nuanced view of the process though which personal memoir, as a genre, can come to be fertilized by bullshit. Over the course of 100 minutes or so, he artfully weaves diverse narrative strands into a complex Daisey chain that ultimately argues for the paramount importance of honesty. His truth may not be simple, but it is, in its own way, pure.”
TIME OUT NEW YORK
“Watching Daisey sort out anything on stage is a delirious, brainy, hilarious, infuriating experience from which one emerges perversely hopeful: the world may be screwed, but for one moment, it seems, at least one guy gets it.”
METRO
“Speaking non-stop for over an hour while seated behind a simple desk on stage, Daisey weaves the saga of Frey's literary rise and fall into his own personal recollections and feelings about bending the truth when telling about one's life. Not unlike an extended verbal essay, Daisey's performance draws us from one topic to the next, from his father's disappointment at his own bending of the truth to a friend's death, commenting on the importance of personal integrity and the evolution of his thoughts on the subject.”
MEDIABISTRO
“This story is not just about truth, it's about mortality. It's about loss, but it's also about connection. It's about storytelling itself, a story familiar to Mike Daisey, and, of course, to all of us. This story is comical without ever being smug. This story is redemptive without ever being maudlin. This is a true story in the best and fullest sense of the word.”
NYTHEATRE.COM
ABOUT 21 DOG YEARS
"Absolutely hilarious! . . . A comic philosopher. Mr. Daisey nails with damning detail, and his often vociferous malice is delicious."
NEW YORK TIMES
"Surreal, silly and telling . . . Daisey is brutally funny."
SEATTLE TIMES
"Irresistible storytelling . . . elevating and hilarious . . . With only a laptop, a latte, and a desk made from a door as props, Daisey delivers, and skewers, whole cultures: of an office, an empire, and an era."
SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY
"Daisey is that rare solo performer who knows that he is as capable of being as big a fool as the rest of us. His witty reminiscence of three years in Jeff Bezos' empire just before the dot-com bust is whip-smart, and cuts the Master's hubris right down to the core, but Daisey never falters from damning himself—and, by extension, the rest of us—for so hungrily believing."
SEATTLE WEEKLY
"A penetrating and ebulliently performed account of one man's realization that life in big business is a contradiction in terms . . . Daisey spoofs the glazed-eye fanaticism of life in the rat race with exuberant relish."
THE GUARDIAN
"Daisey's storytelling methods are utterly captivating. Every word, every repetition, every gesticulation reverberates . . . he’s the consummate performer. As a lesson in storytelling prowess, 21 Dog Years is textbook brilliance . . . thought-provoking, amusing and continually enchanting."
THE LIST
"Like some out-of-shape Jon Krakauer, Mike Daisey has survived and returned from a hellish expedition into the American Dream to tell us what he saw there. He's an anti-inspirational speaker [who] doesn't flinch from riding your nerves. A sharp and funny monologue, 21 Dog Years remains a refreshing ride alongside the national rat race."
WILLAMETTE WEEK
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Watch Mike on David Letterman. Link
Watch Mike being interviewed by Connie Chung. Link
Watch Mike's short film from inside Amazon.com. Link
Watch Mike at the site of Nikola Tesla's laboratory. Link
Listen to Mike discuss Scientology on NPR. Link
Listen to Mike discuss Amazon on Weekend Edition. Link
***
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