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Culture Stage

Daisey chain

Mess with the facts while creating a work of art and you can get into deep trouble.

Foolish me, I showed a draft of my play A Fertile Imagination – about two lesbians trying to have a baby – to my partner. Before long she was wailing in anguish about the pivotal conflict-laden baby shower scene.

“How could you do that?” she howled. “We loved our shower. What will our friends say.”

“They’ll say I’m making theatre,” I said reassuringly.

Of course, that was my story, and out in the world I could get away with that. But when a narrative is wrenched from the headlines, all hell can break loose.

The Iron Lady director Phyllida Lloyd was pilloried for playing fast and loose with the facts about Margaret Thatcher. In an interview before the release of the film, Lloyd was very clear.

“It’s not a biopic. It’s not a documentary. It’s something else.”

A noted sequence features That-cher walking into the Commons as if she were the only female member of Parliament. She wasn’t – there were 37 others. But, says Lloyd, Thatcher felt like she was alone

“Everything that is heroic about her is her idea of her own heroism. It’s all in her head.”

Nice try, but it didn’t wash with people who think there’s such a thing as a single truth.

We all know biopics are fictionalized entertainments, but they can have a huge impact on real life. There were tons of people who thought Be cause he played Knute Rockne, Ronald Reagan got votes from people who thought he really played college football. And Larry Flynt got new young fans thanks to Milos Forman’s smarmy lionization, The People Vs. Larry Flynt. (See my assessment)

But now that playwright Mike Daisey has fudged the facts in The Agony And The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, all hell is breaking loose.

Apple lovers feel vindicated, audiences feel betrayed, and theatre artists developing the new form of doc-u-mentary theatre feel deeply that the genre will lose credibility.

“I was shocked, disappointed and angry, yet pleased when Daisey came forward and talked about the nature of his work and admitted to some fabrication,” says Liza Balkan, who used verbatim transcripts for the play Out The Window, her take on the police killing of Otto Vass.

Where Daisey plainly has a point of view and knew he had an exposé in the making, Balkan was interested in more than simply slamming the police

“I never wanted it to be a polemic. That’s too easy, and the issues are complex, so I was painstaking about staying true to the truth of the situation.”

Annabel Soutar’s show Seeds portrays Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser, who was sued by Monsanto for growing canola from genetically modified seeds that he said blew onto his land.

Soutar did more research for that piece than most journalists do for a 10,000-word story, talking to practically every farmer in the area, even checking in with Monsanto executives.

“Daisey pumped up the facts to keep up the drama,” she tells me over the phone from Montreal, “and I relate to that temptation. But I try to maintain the integrity of the facts I find out. I’m not seeking to create scandal. I’m seeking to uncover truths the public doesn’t know.”

David Ferry, however, challenges the idea that there’s a single truth in the first place. He starred in the recent production of Balkan’s play, is cast in the next production of Seeds, and he’s the centrepiece of Daisey’s one-man show.

In the wake of the NPR controversy, he’s been an active and vocal defender of Daisey’s reputation.

It was NPR’s Ira Glass who made the mistake of dealing with Daisey as if he were a journalist and didn’t follow up with any questions of his own to Apple, says Ferry. But Daisey’s an artist, not a journalist.

“Theatre is all artifice,” he exclaims emphatically. “Anybody who says theatre can tell real truth – as in documentary drama – is ridiculous. I want to tell a story that moves, stuns, excites and shocks.

“Why are we so ready to crucify artists when they take flights of fancy? Maybe Daisey’s eyes got big and the pie was too tempting not to take.” Ferry allows, “But in the end, NPR was ready to rip his jugular out because the network was made to look bad.”

Chris Abraham, who helped develop both Seeds and Out The Window, isn’t so sure. In documentary theatre, he says, you make a kind of contract with your audience, and nobody wants to be made a fool of. Soutar almost fell into the same trap.

“Annabel thought Schmeiser was a kind of beacon of truth-telling, but in the process of investigating his story she began to worry that he wasn’t the truth-teller she thought he was,” says Abraham from Stratford, where he’s directing The Matchmaker this season.

“But the play also scrutinizes the way her own practice was not dissimilar. She’s taking something pure and modifying it for her own ends – for the greater good, sure, but there’s also personal gain to consider, and the ego of the artists.”

Ferry cautions against assuming that just because a play is based on transcripts, intentions and meanings can’t shift.

“The way I cross my legs, the way I interpret the man I actually met – we as artists are always creating a point of view.”

Balkan, too, is far from naive about the way text can be manipulated.

“It’s what we do in the theatre. We add intention in order to understand motivation, and we can manipulate that at the drop of a hat. There were days in rehearsal when an actor would be predisposed to look at police officers negatively, and that infused the reading.

Because I’m investigating truth and what happened, I wanted to see what happens when we don’t do that. What do the words tell us?”

But what’s wrong with having a point of view? Whatever the specifics, The Agony And The Ecstasy tells an important truth: by our standards, Apple and its manufacturing partner, Foxconn, are engaging in exploitive labour practices. And the fact that Mike Daisey made a theatre piece about that made a big difference.

“The New York Times went over there and uncovered everything that was mentioned in the play,” Ferry says. “That’s the huge power of the poet.”

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