Ben on "If You See Something, Say Something"

Most actors want their performance to seem real, but, for many, artistic truth is extremely difficult to convey. Actors train in studios like Lee Strasberg for years just to get close to it. Some even dedicate their lives to the effort and never quite get there. Yet sometimes an anomaly of an actor can come along. Every so often, a guy can be so unabashedly strange, so powerfully intense and so uniquely talented that he doesn’t have to try to be real onstage, he just is real. Realism flows out of them like water out of fountains. Mike Daisey is that anomaly.

At Joe’s Pub—a restaurant/theater where the Global New York stream enjoyed the guilty pleasures of melodrama and cheesecake at the same time, Mike Daisey’s newest show was in full swing: If You See Something, Say Something. It is a fantastic, darkly comical critique of American homeland security and the epic stories that surround the Trinity test site: the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. Mike Daisey, with his eloquence and acute sense of timing, takes you from hearty laughter to reflective silence in a heartbeat. Once engaged in the performance, you wonder how one person can remember and perform ninety minutes worth of lines. The answer: he doesn’t have lines. He just has the story in his mind and a few notes which he never looks at. He sets the stakes high but does not disappoint us. As we walked out, a thought came to someon

If your interested in having an incredible one man show experience, If You See Something, Say Something is playing at Joe’s Pub.

- Ben Russell