Mike Daisey's acclaimed solo show The Trump Card will return to New York City for one final performance tonight, November 1, at 8pm at Town Hall (123 W. 43rd Street).
After a 13-city, whistle-stop national tour, this performance will be the last time the monologue will ever be performed by Daisey, and the performance will be live streamed by Slate.com.
Created and performed by Daisey, the show features direction by Isaac Butler and is presented by Barrow Street Productions in association with The Public Theater. Tickets are $50 (plus service fee) and can be purchased online at www.TicketMaster.com.
In The Trump Card, Mike Daisey takes on the reigning world heavyweight of self-mythologizing, the short-fingered vulgarian who captured a nation's heart through bullying, charm, one-syllable explosions, and occasionally telling the brutal truth: Donald J. Trump. Daisey tells Trump's story from his earliest days, tracking him as he makes himself into a new American archetype-the very first rich man famous exclusively for being rich. Instead of dismissing Trump as a simple con artist and huckster, Daisey breaks down what makes Trump tick-and in doing so illuminates the state of our American Dream and how we've sold it out.
This summer The Trump Card had a run at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater before going on tour to the Guthrie Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Woolly Mammoth in DC & more.
Mike Daisey has been hailed as "the master storyteller" and "one of the finest solo performers of his generation" by The New York Times and is the preeminent monologist in the American theater today. He has been compared to a modern-day Mark Twain and a latter-day Orson Welles for his provocative monologues that combine the political and the personal, weaving together secret histories with hilarity and heart. He's known for art that has reinvented his form, like his critically acclaimed 29-night live theatrical novel, All the Faces of the Moon, a 40-hour performance staged at The Public Theater in New York City.
He has toured across five continents, ranging from remote islands in the South Pacific to the Sydney Opera House to abandoned theaters in post-Communist Tajikistan. He's been a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, the Late Show with David Letterman, a longtime host and storyteller with The Moth, as well as a commentator and contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper's Magazine, Newsweek, WIRED, Vanity Fair, Slate, Salon, NPR and the BBC. In a brief, meteoric career with This American Life the two episodes dedicated to him are among the most listened to and argued about in that program's history. He has been nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award, two Drama League Awards, and is the recipient of the Bay Area Critics Circle Award, six Seattle Times Footlight Awards, the Sloan Foundation's Galileo Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship.
As a playwright, his transcript of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was downloaded over 100,000 times in the first week it was made available. Under a revolutionary open license it has seen more than 150 productions around the world and been translated into six languages. Years later there are productions being staged all over the world every night from in Germany to Sao Paolo to mainland China. The Trump Card was similarly recently staged by over fifteen theater companies across America as a national piece of political theater.
He is currently at work on his second book, Here at the End of Empire, which will be published by Simon and Schuster, and a twenty-five night, forty-hour full-length theatrical monologue adaptation of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
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