It’s not theater, it’s just lying-Ross and Burbank on Mike Daisey Apple/China controversy

It was a heartbreaking story of the tyranny of technology. A Chinese factory worker seeing an iPad in action for the first time, longingly stroking the screen with the hand badly mangled while manufacturing iPads in horrible conditions. It was one of several stories that helped propel actor/writer Mike Daisey’s one-man show “The Agony And Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” to smash success on Broadway and nationwide. And now it turns out much of it wasn’t true.

So what’s the big deal? Daisey bills his work as theater rather than journalism. But the problem is he billed his most compelling fiction as fact. A reporter who followed up on the story located the translator Daisey claimed couldn’t be located, who debunked some of the most dramatic tales including the story of meeting the worker with the mangled hand.

“This is not true. It’s just like a movie,” she says.

And now a huge controversy has erupted after the popular public radio program “This American Life” was forced to issue an embarrasing retraction of what became its most downloaded episode ever. And it’s angering many others who aired interviews with the former Seattle artist.

“He did a lot of non-theater where he showed up on our show, on television programs, on this American Life and he lied. He lied to us about the people he met and that’s not theater, that’s just lying,” says Ross and Burbank co-host Luke Burbank.

Ross and Burbank confronted Daisey about his then alleged dishonesty when he appeared on their show last May. He defended his show and insisted his accounts of the terrible working conditions and suffering that goes on in the plants that make Apple’s popular devices were true.

“You know, what I’ve found over the years; facts are your friends,” Daisey told Ross and Burbank. “If there’s ever a case where I’m telling a story and I find the facts are inconvenient, 9 times out of 10 I haven’t thought about the story deeply enough, I really believe in this because the world is more complex and more interesting than my imagination.”

Listen to: Mike Daisey defends claims of “The Agony And Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”

“He didn’t have to do this, he didn’t have to make stuff up because he saw enough with his own eyes that he could have just explained that and said news reports talked about,” says Ross.

“He could say ‘and I imagine the young man I met in that other plant with the mangled hand stroking the screen of this magical thing.’ He didn’t have to pretend it actually happened.

Daisey performed the show for the last time Sunday night in New York before ending a long run, and cut questionable sections from the monologue and added a prologue explaining the controversy. Prior to the show, he told the audience he altered the script to make it more accurate.

And on “This American Life” he apologized not for the inaccuracies, but for allowing “This American Life” to air the show focusing on his claims.

“What I do is not journalism,” he explained. “The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic, not a theatrical, enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret.”

“He lied,” responds Burbank.

What do you think?

-Josh Kerns/My Northwest.com