DEFENDING THE PLAYGOER

I'd kinda like to get Playgoer Garrett Eisler's back to some degree on this Mike Daisey incident, even though I disagree with him on many aspects. Eisler is less bothered by the water-pouring aspect than I am. He's quite correct to call the act "ugly," but I feel like it goes a bit further. The guy clearly wanted to directly attack Daisey's ideas, and no one else in the group raised a voice to stop him. (Along these same lines, I would direct the same criticism at the people who threw pie at Ann Coulter.)

I also don't agree with his assessment that Daisey behaved badly in response. Perhaps he might have responded more gently if he had all the information that surfaced later, but in that moment he had the mass walkout and the hateful water-pouring moment fresh in his mind and was understandably and justifiably angry. I give him huge props as a performer for getting the show back on track.

I'm not willing to go as far as saying that Daisey's first amendment rights were violated, because that's the very definition of a slippery slope. I want people to be able to protest things, even dramatically, without being vulnerable to the accusation that they are infringing on the free speech of the person or event they're protesting. I oppose hate crime legislation for a similar reason. Crimes should be prosecuted, to my mind, not motives. The man who went on the stage (later identified as "David" by Daisey on his blog) may be morally accountable for many things, but to my mind is only legally accountable for his vandalism.

But getting back to why I'm partly with Eisler on this. As an intellectual exercise, I'm going to list all of the things we now know about the Invincible Summer incident that we couldn't glean from Daisey's original post and accompanying YouTube:

- This was not in any way a staged protest. The group had purchased their tickets that same day and knew little (far too little, as it turned out) about the show.

- The "Christian group" described in the original post were students, chaperones, and teachers from Norco High School in California, a public high school with an Amnesty International Club and a Gay And Straight Alliance alongside the Alpha Omega Bible Club.

- Daisey's pre-show announcement contains profanity. According to Norco Principal John Johnson, a teacher, after hearing this announcement, asked the house manager if the group could leave before the show started, and was told that was not possible.

- The theater in which Daisey is performing Invincible Summer is steeply raked and only has exits in the front of the house, requiring the school group to make a more aggressive and exhibitionist exit than they might otherwise have chosen to make (also causing several of them to pass before the camera, making the YouTube more dramatic).

- Most of the people who left were students who were being directed to leave by their teachers and chaperones.

Now, obviously none of these factors excuse David's actions. But they do redefine the event somewhat from our worst fears when we first heard about it, fears of coordinated right-wing attacks on edgy theater productions and so forth. And they are all things we didn't know when we were first deciding how to respond to this incident. What I admire about Eisler's response was that he approached this matter from the standpoint of recognizing that we needed to know more than Daisey originally told us. So he called ART and asked more questions.

I'm not saying that Daisey was responsible for providing the blogosphere with a journalistic account of what occurred. I'm saying that the rest of us should have had a journalistic response. Even if we weren't going to break out the shoe leather and make the calls, we should have dispassionately tried to work out what information we had and what questions still needed to be asked.

This is a crucial skill in understanding any political event. You have to break it down into what you know and what you don't know, and you can only form an opinion when you've built a minimal critical mass of actual knowledge about a situation. Garrett among the bloggers (along with Goeff Edgers of the Boston Globe) helped to build that critical mass (though he fell short in informing himself about Daisey's writing process, it seems).

After his initial posting on the event, Daisey himself began to take this journalistic approach and aggressively sought out an opportunity to speak with David. David revealed himself to be a man grappling with a level of emotional disturbance bordering on paranoia, and based on reading Daisey's second post I would say David needs a therapist more than he needs prayer just at the moment. Still, his phobic instability might be known among the other teachers and chaperones, possibly making them fearful and reluctant to interfere when he poured water on Daisey's work, knowing his self-described anger issues. Maybe not, but again - we don't know, and it's worth cutting them some slack.

Garrett Eisler has been called a "contrarian" several times throughout this episode. The more I think about the term, the more insulting it seems. Implicit in the term "contrarian" is the idea that Garrett likes to argue against the consensus no matter what his true beliefs are. The suggestion is that Eisler first canvassed the blogs, determined the majority opinion, and then concocted an artificial argument for the opposite side. By calling him a contrarian, one implies that Eisler isn't being sincere in his opinion - that he's lying. Some people have earned the term "contrarian" over long, irrational careers in the public eye (Exhibit A: Mickey Kaus), but not Eisler. I think we should stop using the term. It insults Eisler and insulates us from having to address his actual ideas.

As I said at the outset, I think David did an awful thing to Daisey, but I don't think the rest of the group did. It sucks when people walk out, it's hurtful (in Daisey's shoes, I would be devestated and not able to return to the stage for weeks), but it's their right. And even David's actions, terrible as they were, are clearly not the first shots fired in some sinister Rightwing Christofascist attack on theater. Daisey deserves our sympathy for what happened, as well as our admiration for how he handled it, but I feel like we lost out here on a chance to have a more nuanced and interesting conversation than we could have had.

--SlowLearner

Comments

[isaac]

My problem with Eisler (who I admire and consider a friend and colleague) was the tone of his initial post, in which he presumed to know what Daisey should've done in the moment, and criticized Daisey with a tone of smug superiority for not doing what he would've done. That *particular* post struck me as knee-jerk contrarianism and condescension. I don't think playgoer is (in general) a contrarian, but I thought that particular post had a whiff of the Mickey Kaus (or any other non-Dahlia-Lithwick political writer for Slate) to it, combined with the imperiousness of a reviewer.

I found it especially galling considering that Playgoer was imagining himself to be experiencing something that he, as someone who has chosen to write about theater rather than make it, will never be at a risk of experiencing, and therefore can have no possible idea what his reaction would be. In that context, his first post on the subject seemed a cheap shot.

His follow up posts, on the other hand, were much more even handed and concerned with having a conversation with his readership about the issue. While I disagreed with his view of the issue in these later posts, I thought tonally they were much better and allowed for a real conversation to happen.

All I'm saying is I think a lot of people's rather hostile reaction to Playgoer's initial post had less to do with content than with form. and tone. Less to do with subject than with treament, if I may beat my own dead horse...

[Mac]

In the post you linked to, Eisler wrote this:

"I know it may not be fair to criticize a very private moment for Daisey. And I can't be so sure I would be so heroic either in such a surprise situation."

So I do feel like an element of humility was there. Also, I can't agree with the description of his post as "knee-jerk," as it was at least partly drawn from new information about the incident.

[jennifer gordon thomas]

i have a very hard time reading tone in email...so i stopped trying... and began taking the words exactly as they were written and not by the emotional reaction that it sparked in me. i've been burned by my reading "tone" too many times.

[Joshua James]

I haven't commented on this, simply because I don't see a problem with someone rebelling against something they don't want to listen to . . .

I have NO problem with people doing the same to Coulter, therefore I have no problem with folks doing the same to theatre artists. It's not as though Daisey is defenseless . . . far from it.

I think the "christian" groups are idiots (and they did identify themselves as such, right, and anyone who maintains that they had to get the "children" out of there for "security is an idiot) but they have the right to be idiots.

Daisey has the right to call them out.

If anything, Daisey's career just got a huge boost.

[Mike Daisey]

I'm actually fond of the term contrarian--I feel it has an established pedigree of idiosyncratic thought and questioning the status quo--so I apologize to Eisler if it came out more flip, or as a put down. Some of my best friends really are contrarians, and I have carried that title on occasion myself, but the points made here are totally valid regarding that title as being often perjorative.

[sary]

this one is simple & nice.

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