Ron May stars as Mike Daisey in the one-man production "The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." (Photo courtesy by Jeff Groseclose)The Herberger Theater’s production of “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” wrapped up it’s two-week run Saturday night. Ron May, the local actor who is staring as Mike Daisey in the one-man show, spoke with The State Press about Daisey’s reverence for Apple compared to his own, being late to Apple fanaticism and keeping a 90-minute monologue fresh for two weeks.
The State Press: Were you an Apple fanatic before you got the part?
Ron May: To a point — I’m nowhere near the kind of obsessed fanatic that Mike Daisey, the guy that wrote it, is. But, I had a friend who always swore by it and convinced me to get an iPad, and once I got that that kind of changed my world. I don’t even have a laptop anymore. I just use that.
SP: How did you get the part?
RM: I worked at Actors Theater and Matthew Weiner, the guy who runs the place, has seen me in things before, so it was pretty easy actually, he just asked me if I wanted to do it.
SP: Have you met Mike Daisey at all?
RM: I’ve talked to him via email but never spoken to him.
SP: Did he give you any feedback for the role?
RM: Not a lot. The most feedback that we got was that script changed pretty significantly. When he released it for people to do, it had the stuff in there that was in “This American Life” that people questioned, so he rewrote a second version. We started rehearsals with the first version and we read where the “lies” were, so we excised all those and tried to come up with our own shtick for it, and two days before we opened, (laughs) we got the revised version, which cut out about six minutes of what we added and (then) added about nine minutes of his stuff.
SP: What do you do for preparation for a role like this?
RM: Ninety percent of it is getting the lines down because it’s just me up there for 90-minutes. So, it was just a lot of drilling lines. That was the biggest thing.
SP: Were you aware of Foxconn before you got the job?
RM: A little, only because he had been performing the show since 2010, so I sort of heard about it, but it was only in my peripheral vision. I knew there was a guy doing a show about Apple that was slamming their business practices.
SP: Did you do you do anything to extemporize the material on the page?
RM: No. Since it’s so personal and he’s such a good writer that I just stuck to everything that he’s got on the page.
SP: How do you keep your performance fresh for two weeks?
RM: … Any time you go out there, you hope that you’re going to be telling the story for the first time and you’re telling it to a bunch of people who have never heard it before. The audience makes it really easy because they all respond, as if they’re hearing it for the first time, so it’s easy to tell it.
Reach the reporter at tccoste1@asu.edu
