Or at least that's how he began on Tuesday night; tonight or tomorrow it might be different, because "Monopoly!," the second of three Daisey monologues presented by the American Repertory Theatre at Zero Arrow, like all his work has no fixed script. On Tuesday that meant it ran over two hours, rather than the 80 minutes the ushers had announced, with no intermission. But (except for a minute or two near the end, when I started to wonder if his hatred of endings was going to keep him talking for the rest of the night) I never looked at my watch.
It's hard to convey the power of Daisey's work through simple description. (It's also hard, apparently, to avoid metaphors like "power" and "energy" when talking about it.) In a way he's not even really theatrical; he's just a guy, talking. He tells great stories, he's funny and angry and smart and obscene, but some people come away wondering why they didn't just go to a bar and listen to the liveliest guy there.
Well, for one thing, that guy probably isn't quite as sharp as Daisey. More important, he probably isn't as concerned with weaving his funny or sad or crazy stories into a larger whole, with taking the fascinating detritus of daily life and world history and rubbing together bits of it until they send off sparks. It's not the stories that make theater; it's the storyteller -- and, even more, it's the storyteller's ability to fill the shared air of a theatrical space with the intangible but very real . . . energy of his art.
