(already subscribe? log in).

Mike Daisey spins a New Year’s Eve tale

NEW YEAR’S EVE: THEATER

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

December 30, 2011|By Laura Collins-Hughes

I think [New Years Eve] is the night we are all supposed to have the most fun,… (sara krulwich/the new york…)

NEW YORK - Mike Daisey has committed to spending his New Year’s Eve in Boston, and he already regrets it.

“Which is in keeping,’’ the storyteller says, “with the traditions of New Year’s Eve: that one is always regretting what one actually decided to do, because the thing you could be doing is of course far more awesome than the thing you actually decided to do.’’

New Year’s Eve is the subject of Daisey’s show tomorrow night at the Boston University Theatre, where, to his chagrin, he has been informed that he will be performing not on a spare, stripped-down stage - design simplicity being his aesthetic preference - but on the domestic-interior set of the Huntington Theatre Company’s production of “God of Carnage.’’

Titled “When the Clock Strikes,’’ Daisey’s piece will be made specifically for First Night, but it’s a little early for him to be talking about it. That’s partly because of the hour, just after 10 a.m. (the interview having been moved up so he could squeeze in a “This American Life’’ taping later in the day), and partly because he’s an extemporaneous, last-minute kind of performer and hasn’t given it much thought yet.

“I think I agreed to it in part because I’ve had a number of sort of moderately unremarkable New Year’s Eves,’’ he says over breakfast a few blocks from his Brooklyn home, at a restaurant with elegantly worn plank floors and creamy pressed-tin ceilings. “I thought that it might be better to, like, actually do something than to not. Of course, the moment - the moment - I took this - the moment - I got invited to a bunch of really great parties.’’

Daisey, who is 38, is ending this year with a higher profile than he’s ever had. His monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’’ has been a hit at New York’s Public Theater. Interweaving the tale of the Apple CEO with a narrative about how the company’s products are made in China, it opened shortly after Jobs’s death in October and ran until this month. The show, which local audiences saw in an earlier form last year at Cape Cod Theatre Project in Falmouth, will return to the Public at the end of January for another five weeks.

As Daisey warms to the subject of New Year’s, preferring to spin theories rather than eat the rustic farmer’s breakfast on the plate in front of him, a couple at a table behind him have figured out who Daisey is. Instead of talking to each other, they sit snuggled together in the corner of their wooden booth, listening to him.