Grace Reading Series

Our first Boys' School substitute teacher is Mike Daisey, who is fabulous and who is in Williamsburg performing at Galapagos tonight at 8pm--I will be there so come say hi if you make it out.

Mike is a monologuist the New York Times has called "the master storyteller" and his new series is all about "megalomania and desire constructed from the interleaved life stories of Bertolt Brecht, P.T. Barnum, Nikola Tesla and L. Ron Hubbard." He's super smart and funny and dark and great to watch--no performance is ever the same. His brilliant wife, Jean-Michele Gregory, directs. I will be having a brief chat with Mike each Friday this month here at the Grace blog.

EM: Okay, Mike, so tell me about the overall concept of GREAT MEN OF GENIUS.

MD: I take the biographies of four infamous but not always well-known geniuses and talk about their lives, teasing out the meaning of genius by reflecting back and forth between biography of them and autobiographical stories. It's like an episode of BIOGRAPHY mixed with THIS AMERICAN LIFE and performed by someone very fond of KIDS IN THE HALL and THE DAILY SHOW.

EM: What would you guess women writers have to learn from these particular boy geniuses you're delving into?

MD: Well, it's "men" for a reason—one of the unifying elements in this particular quartet is their chauvinism, and many of the monologues have sub-themes on the tortured relationships many of these men had with women. So I suspect that's interesting to everybody.

I'm also parsing the idea of genius—is it truly inspired, or is it a social construct we use to anoint certain, chosen people, or something of a mixture of the two. Lest you think that it's just a lecture, there are also a lot of funny, humiliating and embarrassing anecdotes—it's a ride.

EM: Who is the genius for tonight & what's the scoop?

MD: Tonight I'm talking about Bertolt Brecht, renowned German bad-boy playwright, who lived and loved a constant group of women, usually three or four at a time...and in the years since his death it's becoming more and more clear that the women wrote almost everything. So I examine the nature of collaboration, and the rules that emerge from it both sexually, politically and intellectually.

EM: Will you be talking tonight in the monologue about how hot I looked in that lavender bridesmaid's dress at the wedding we were both just in?

MD: No, but the sordid and steamy events of the bachelorette party are actually in the monologue about P.T. Barnum. Very hot, Elizabeth. Very.

GREAT MEN OF GENIUS:

Created and Performed by Mike Daisey
Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory

"You get the feeling that Daisey is coming to new conclusions and realizations all the time, right there on stage--that his delving into the minds of these men is never complete, and that it's deepening before your eyes."
The Stranger

"An interestingly unpredictable and uneasy moosh of homage and parody...a kind of dual Rorschach test, in which one man identifies his own demons and ideals in the ink-blot of another's life story."
Seattle Times

"Daisey comes off as a kindred comic cousin to the late Saturday Night Live actor Chris Farley or maybe the precocious brother to social commentator/filmmaker Michael Moore. Each performance literally has a life of its own, as Daisey works without a script, using only a few pages of notes on yellow legal pad pages, and a towel always close at hand to wipe the sweat from his animated face."
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Friday, May 5 ~ Bertolt Brecht, playwright, poet, lover of women and certifiable cad who escaped Nazi Germany, sympathized with the Communists, failed in Hollywood, was persecuted by McCarthy, and redefined world theater.

Friday, May 12 ~ P.T. Barnum, gifted entrepreneur, showman, raconteur, hoaxster, freakshow and circus promoter who changed the face of nineteenth century America through blatant, shameless lying.

Friday, May 19 ~ Nikola Tesla, mad genius, brilliant scientist and visionary who sparred with Thomas Edison and died insane and penniless writing love sonnets to pigeons after bringing the world electricity as we know it.

Friday, May 26 ~ L. Ron Hubbard, bigamist, occultist, and charismatic science fiction author-turned-guru who took 1950's popular psychiatry by storm and went on to create the Church of Scientology: the most celebrity-driven and litigious organization on Earth.

ALL SHOWS AT 8PM AT GALAPAGOS ART SPACE
Located at 70 North 6th Street between Kent and Wythe
In Williamsburg--take the L train to Bedford

For tickets and information call 212.868.4444 or click here