“The Last Cargo Cult” is at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company through Feb. 7. Tickets are available at woollymammoth.net.
When Mike Daisey tells you about his money problems, he doesn’t mean that he has too little.
“Money — currency — is corrosive to human relationships,” he said, flatly. “It corrodes the human connections that create communities, and replaces them with fiduciary connections.”
Strange talk from a man who once made his living as a business development executive for Amazon, an experience he chronicled in his 2002 monologue and memoir, “21 Dog Years.” But on a break from preparations for his latest solo show at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, four days before it’s set to open here, the 36-year-old raconteur has the confidence of certainty, however provocative his premise. Even in what is ostensibly an informal chat, he unspools his argument in lucid, flowing paragraphs, seldom restarting a sentence the way amateur conversationalists are prone to do.
Daisey, of course, is no amateur. Since “Dog Years” put him on the map, and on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” his semi-improvisational (outline yes, script never) monologues have solidified his reputation as one of the most imaginative and entrancing talkers in America. The title of his new one, “The Last Cargo Cult,” suggests an “Indiana Jones” adventure more than it does a treatise on how the global financial crisis happened and why it’s probably going to happen again.
Woolly audiences who saw Daisey perform 2008’s “If You See Something, Say Something,” a riff on post-9/11 hysteria, or last year’s “How Theatre Failed America,” know he has a rare aptitude for distilling complicated matters into relatable human moments.
“Cargo Cult” was born at Woolly in two workshop performances last summer. Though runs in Portland, Ore., and New York City have matured the show — “it’s a young adult now,” Daisey said — raising this peculiar child tested even his mighty tale-telling prowess. Making a compelling story out of high finance turns out to be just as tough as it sounds.
“They call economics ‘the dismal science,'” Daisey said. “That’s not an error. It’s unpleasant to study, and not particularly evocative. It has the complexity of biology and chemistry, but it lacks the grandeur of being beyond the mind of man.”
Happily, the show’s other major component is considerably more “Technicolor,” he said. Interwoven with his survey of fiscal Armageddon is an account of Daisey’s February 2009 visit to Tanna, an island of the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, where the U.S. military set up outposts during World War II.
“They were only there for a few years, with their refrigerators and radios and chocolate and cigarettes,” Daisey said. “Then they vanished. Nothing makes something magical more than seeing it and wanting it, then having it removed.” Sects that believed the Americans’ left-behind consumer goods were supernatural in origin, and could be multiplied through magic — cargo cults — soon appeared.
The subject of cargo cults has appealed to Daisey “as its own resonant metaphor” for years. He didn’t know if there was a show in it until he read about John Frum Day. Every Feb. 15, the denizens of Tanna gather at the base of an active volcano, raise the American flag, and tell the history of America, as they understand it, in song and dance. Daisey happened to hear of the ritual in November 2008, just as the global markets were melting down.
“I had this moment where I realized I had to go to the island,” he recalled.
That moment is typical of Daisey’s binary creative process.
“I only can work on things that I’m obsessed with. Preferably there’s more than one obsession, and they’re in collision with one another,” he explained. Moreover, “I have to believe there is an essential need in my society to hear about this [subject]. Lots of things don’t pass that litmus test.”
If making economics into an engrossing narrative was hard, clearing the relevance hurdle was never easier. Daisey feels a grim deja vu: The show that made his name, “21 Dog Years,” was in part about a financial bubble a decade ago. That one was merely national. But he’s taking “Cargo Cult” to Ireland and Australia this year, which he can do because the 2008 crash reverberated planetwide.
“The spikes keep getting higher and the drops deeper,” he lamented. “But there’s no understanding, and certainly no political will, to make the hard choices or ask the hard questions that come from that.”
America, we need to talk.
