How Theater Failed America

Mike Daisey’s solo performance piece, How Theater Failed America, transfers directly from a sold-out, critically-acclaimed run at Joe’s Pub (concluding May 11) to Off-Broadway’s Barrow Street Theatre. Jean-Michele Gregory directs.

Daisey’s monologue is about theater, failure, passion, and hope. From gorgeous new theaters standing empty as cathedrals, to “successful” working actors traveling like migrant farmhands, to an arts culture unwilling to speak or listen to
its own nation, Daisey takes stock of the dystopian state of theater in America: a shrinking world with smaller audiences every year. Fearlessly implicating himself and the system he works within, Daisey seeks answers to essential and dangerous questions about the art we’re making, the legacy we leave the future, and who it is we believe we’re speaking to.

Each Sunday, a roundtable forum with theater artists and administrators will
follow the performance. Slated guest include: Eric Bogosian, Robert Brustein, James Bundy, Jim Nicola, Richard Nelson, Lisa Kron, Maria Dizzia, Gideon Lester, Maria Goyanes, Paige Evans, and others in direct conversation with working actors, technicians, designers and independent producers of the American theater.