Theater News

Has Mike Daisey grown tired of hearing himself talk? The storyteller
from Maine—who launched his theater career in Seattle with a
monologue about working at
Amazon.com, before moving to New
York—has finally written a play.

Daisey has a rich, restless imagination. His monologues amble
through the halls of the American mind—Monopoly! concerned
Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Microsoft, board games, experimental
theater, Wal-Mart, and his Maine hometown—and the new play,
titled The Moon Is a Dead World, is set in a remote military
outpost in Greenland during the Cold War.

In a remote radio-espionage station, Americans Peter Nimitz (a
cursing, gnashing General MacArthur type played by Jack Hamblin) and
Cal Anderson (a sweet, literate, knock-kneed character named after
Washington’s first openly gay state senator and played by Clayton
Weller) are bored and crabby, listening to the Soviets hurl one
cosmonaut after another into space. The cosmonauts always
die.

A lovelorn, slightly dumb cosmonaut named Gregor (Zachariah
Robinson) is trapped by a radio wave and beamed down to the Americans,
suffering as their prisoner until he discovers his magical, postmortem
powers. Gregor can read minds, reverse time, and make things happen
just by thinking about them. (“Is it hard to keep it under control?”
Cal asks, during one of their few friendly conversations. “There are
two Grand Canyons now,” Gregor answers. “I keep undoing it, but it
comes back. I must really want it to be that way.”)

The Moon Is a Dead World operates by flimsy comic-book
logic: Gregor is a “fucking suckling infant god,” as Nimitz
describes him, but trapped at the outpost for obscure reasons. And,
like many comic books, Moon uses its supernatural characters as
a way to think about power. Gregor doesn’t try to bring down the
running dogs of American capitalism. He just wants to be left alone to
conjure beyond-the-grave, superhero love (another dead cosmonaut,
Irina, played by Pamala Mijatov). That does not go so well. In the
end, a lack of love—rather than love itself—conquers
all.

Daisey the playwright doesn’t threaten to eclipse Daisey the
storyteller. (Not yet, anyway.) Moon is a minor work, with a few
traces of an inaugural playwright: Some direct address (“such a
well-fed group!”), some overflorid passages (“I am Irina That Was, born
from my mother’s womb in the high, thin forests of the Urals, the Irina
who lived and suffered and died beyond the edge of the sky”), and some
theater-dork inside-jokes (Nimitz on Chekhov: “Fuck
him—you actually think I’ll throw down because of some
we-gaze-into-the-abyss, creep-ass bullshit?”).

The production, like the play, is a fledgling—it wobbles, but
never topples. And in the moments when it finds its feet, Moon is a small, sweet pleasure.