by Brendan Kiley

When Mike Daisey's 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com premiered at the Speakeasy in 2001, Daisey invited the Intiman, along with other big theaters, to see the show. They didn't come. Daisey had to leave town to get the Intiman's attention--which, local theater artists might note, sucks.

"Yes, it does suck," Daisey agreed. "But people incorrectly blame theaters for not hiring local actors. They're trying to keep their audiences happy, and it excites them to know that people are coming from New York and Los Angeles with television and film credits. [Audiences] come to expect actors who were on Murder, She Wrote. It's deeply, deeply unfair, but it's unavoidable. I wouldn't be at the Intiman now if I didn't leave Seattle."

Local reactions to his material are another quirk of bringing 21 Dog Years back to Seattle. For us, Daisey's major themes--Jeff Bezos, the tech bust, the Kingdome implosion--might seem like dead metaphors, but we shouldn't miss the fictional forest for the historical trees. As Daisey's success everywhere from off-Broadway to Edinburgh suggests, his comic thesis is more universal than late-1990s Seattle.

"In other places, it's easier for people to see the connection with all jobs at corporations," he said. "I'd have middle-aged black women come to my show and laugh like nobody's business because they work in the New York City justice system. Outside Seattle--where Amazon isn't a life-and-death issue--the show feels much broader."

Revived local media attention to 21 Dog Years has produced a few oddities. "Misha Berson [of the Seattle Times] keeps calling me 'owl shaped.' I think she thinks it's a nice euphemism for fat," Daisey said. "And I'm sure it's somehow my fault, but the NPR ads describe the show as a 'one-man dot-comedy.' God, I hate that phrase. It sounds like it came right out of some business meeting. I do comedy about corporations, but the mentality is insidious--it slips right in there."

Like Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray, Daisey is a solo performer who has been successfully directed by his wife, but he hopes not to emulate his forebears. "Spalding Gray is a big Danger sign for me," he said. If your life becomes your material and you run out of stories, "the next thing you know, you divorce your wife, sleep with somebody else, and then your next show is the best you've done in years! I'm hoping not to do that."

Good luck.