When audience members turn off their cell phones at the beginning of the current Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” chances are a lot of those phones will be Apple products. The creation of those phones is one of the things that master monologist Mike Daisey addresses in his “Agony and Ecstasy.” “Because we think with blinders on, we think about that part of the story as being separate from the actual devices, because the devices are so beautiful and shiny,” Daisey said. “We assume they are made by robots in some perfect laboratory somewhere. The reality is wildly different.
| Onstage |
| ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’ |
| Where: Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, 641 D St. NW |
| When: 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays; 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Through April 17 |
| Info: Tickets start at $40; 202-393-3939; woollymammoth.net |
“Now one hundred percent of our devices are made in southern China. Sixty-five to seventy percent of them are assembled in a city called Shenzhen in a giant electronics firm, Foxconn, where conditions are not dissimilar to slave labor camps.” Foxconn was the site of multiple suicides in 2010.
In researching this show, Daisey visited the Foxconn plant. “I pretended to be an American businessman, using fake credentials to get on to the factory floor and into the dormitories. I also went to a large number of suppliers and stood in front of the main gates of Foxconn and interviewed hundreds of people.
“The workers are grateful to have these jobs because they make so much more than they would in their villages. But since the very brightest young people go to work making our electronics 16 hours a day, we’re helping the Chinese government keep their fascist country together, because the workers are too exhausted to protest.”
“The Agony and the Ecstasy” weaves together the story of Apple itself and the story of Jobs and his rise and fall and rise at Apple. According to Daisey, Jobs is “a very fascinating, complex person. As I say in the show, he’s a visionary a—–e. He’s a very difficult person but at the same time he has tremendous vision regarding how our world works and how we perceive it.
“He’s drifted very far from where he started. He began as a pirate. The first things that he and Steve Wozniak made were pirate boxes that let you hack into the telephone company. It’s amazing to see the transition. A company that started in piracy has become the most locked-down tech company in the world.”
Daisey is of course hoping that this show will make people aware of the problems associated with Apple’s assembly. “Most people don’t think about these things. It takes time to make people aware that there might be an issue, to get to where the organic food movement is, for instance. There’s a lot of work to do.”
