Illustration by Ian Keltie
Mike Daisey
The New York Times has called him “one of the most engaging solo performers of his generation,” and the New York Post, “the natural heir to Spalding Gray.” So why is Mike Daisey playing Minneapolis—rather than a fancier address—for the debut of his latest show, an 18-part monologue juxtaposing the version of U.S. history from his high school textbook with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States? We caught up with Daisey, who last visited here in 2016 with his show The Trump Card, and asked why he chose the Guthrie to be the place he rewrites history.
“I think there’s a secret, geeky, nerdy subcategory of people who really like secret histories, and there might be more in Minneapolis. I grew up in northern Maine, and I feel like there’s a cousin-ship of people from the cold. I went to a pretty dreadful public school in rural Maine, and people forget, if it’s the ’80s in a poor school district, your textbook is not from the ’80s. It’s maybe from the 1950s or maybe carved clay tablets.
“A couple years ago, I was in this private school classroom and saw all these copies of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That was not what I learned in school. And that was the gap this came from, the epistemological gap between those two histories. How both can look you in the face and say, ‘This is nonfiction. This is absolutely true.’ One of the things about the Guthrie and the Guthrie audience is that I feel like they are extremely game. They are game to have something unexpected happen, and that’s rarer than you think it would be in American theater. I work in an extemporaneous way, so it’s all getting born at the Guthrie. I won’t know entirely what’s in it until you, the audience, know entirely what’s in it. I know I’m making 18 interconnected shows. Show number one is ‘Columbus comes to what he feels is a new world.’ Number 18 is the election of Donald Trump.
“I think it’s coming at a good time for Minneapolis, right at the end of winter when people are ready to get out again. Right when people are ready for a conversation that can be absolutely incredible or your worst nightmare. I like the stakes of that.”
A People’s History is playing at The Guthrie Theater’s Dowling Studio. March 14–31. guthrietheater.org. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
