Theater talker Mike Daisey has a particularly timely monologue with The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, in which he investigates the dark side of the modern miracle of consumer electronics, which stared squarely at him in the ginormous Chinese factories where the gadgets are manufactured at a high human cost. An excerpt from Ben Brantley’s New York Times review:

“For Mr. Daisey, as for many others, affection for Apple products evolved into reverence for Mr. Jobs, the Apple co-founder whose identification with the company and its products has been much remarked upon, and worried over, since his illness made news several years ago.

Mr. Daisey has been performing this show since July of last year, and while the death of Mr. Jobs lends the evening a certain eerie timeliness, it also means that many in the audience will be familiar with the life and career of Mr. Jobs from reading obituaries and tributes.

The hippie-meets-tech-geek ethos, the founding of and then ouster from Apple, the triumphant return and the revolutionary series of consumer products that followed: Mr. Daisey covers this material fluently and with amiable humor, mixing obvious hero worship with some pointed skepticism. (Mr. Jobs, he notes, was the kind of imperious guy who divided the world’s population into ‘geniuses and bozos.’)

But the show is most engrossing, and most disturbing, when Mr. Daisey delves into the grim realities of workers’ lives in Shenzhen, a city that he memorably describes as looking as if ‘Blade Runner threw up on itself.'”

••••••••••

“A laptop so thin you can slice a sandwich”: