'How Theater Failed America' Moving To Barrow Street 5/16

 HOW THEATER FAILED AMERICA, Mike Daisey's monologue about theater, failure, passionand hope, will transfer directly from a sold-out, critically-acclaimed run at Joe's Pub to a strictly limited 6-week engagement at Off-Broadway's Barrow Street Theatre. Created and performed by Mike Daisey and directed by Jean-Michele Gregory, the show begins performances at the Barrow Street Theatre on Friday, May 16.

Final performance at Joe's Pub: Sunday, May 11.Mike Daisey has been called "the master storyteller...one of the finest solo performers of his generation" by the New York Times. In HOW THEATER FAILED AMERICA he sinks his razor-sharp wit into a subject he knows well: the American theater, from the sublimely crass to the genuinely ugly.

From gorgeous new theaters standing empty as cathedrals, to "successful" working actors traveling like migrant farmhands, to an arts culture unwilling to speak or listen to its own nation, Daisey takes stock of the dystopian State of theater in America: a shrinking world with smaller audiences every year. Fearlessly implicating himself and the system he works within, Daisey seeks answers to essential and dangerous questions about the art we're making, the legacy we leave the future, and who it is we believe we're speaking to.HOW THEATER FAILED AMERICA earned rave reviews in its run at Joe's Pub which began April 14. Variety wrote, "Surprising and poetic. This piece should reach anyone who believes in live performance" and Time Out New York declared, "Not only vastly entertaining, it's also a call to action."(1 of 2)