‘Dog’ daze Maine native’s one-man show takes theatergoers inside Internet giant

It’s Friday night at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City’s West Village, and Mike Daisey has the audience rolling. He’s talking about the 19 months he worked for Amazon.com in Seattle. No, he’s shrieking about it, he’s wailing about it, he’s doing a primal scream of disclosure about a hard-driving company that almost stole his soul, almost killed his marriage and nearly transformed him into a sales-driven zombie. It was the frenzy of working overtime, the free bagels, the view of Seattle from the top of the building and the addictive sensation that Amazon.com was creating a better world.

But for Daisey, who grew up in Fort Kent and Etna, the world wasn’t getting better during those 19 months. It was getting crazier. So he quit. A year, a drinking binge and a day later – when his nondisclosure agreement with Amazon expired – Daisey opened “21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com” at a pub in Seattle. The 90-minute, one-man show was picked up by New York’s Fringe Festival and is now playing through September at the off-Broadway theater.

And that’s not all. Today, Daisey is flying to Los Angeles to have lunch with producers to discuss a film version of “21 Dog Years” and Wednesday he’ll be back in New York City for a scheduled appearance on “Late Show with David Letterman” at 11:35 p.m. on CBS.

To those who know Daisey – a quick-witted, smart-talking slacker-cum-dynamo – the gig at Amazon.com was an uncharacteristic career choice. Think of John Candy working for Enron. Or George Carlin working for Verizon. It doesn’t compute. Consider, too, Daisey’s resume, which is handed out in the show’s program He has worked as a security officer, a roofer, a TV commentator, a DJ, a rape counselor, a night janitor. And while it’s true that Daisey has been into computers since he was a boy – check out his acutely expert and friendly Web site at www.mikedaisey.com – he was always more of a theater geek than a customer service drone.

That penchant for madcap versatility kicked off in shows at Nokomis Regional High School, and, as a student at Colby College, Daisey unleashed his gypsylike interests in the theater department. Apropos of his restless personality, Daisey created his own major – aesthetics – and devoted himself, in part, to drama.

“In the spirit of his major, he acted in productions, directed them and rote pieces,” said Jim Thurston, who teaches design in Colby’s theater and dance program. “The image I have of Mike is as an atypical Colby student, walking through the halls tapping a pencil, his mind always going. In every role he played, he was very comfortable with performance. Everybody had a sense when he was a student that he had so many ideas that he could go in a lot of different directions.”

When he was reminded of the possibilities that lay within Daisey’s reach, Dick Sewell, the esteemed professor emeritus from Colby, let out a series of eager and knowing squawks of delight.

“He was born with the stuff,” insisted Sewell. “It was great fun being his teacher but I don’t need to take any credit. He is one of those incredibly gifted, inventive people in touch with his own heart and imagination.”

Sewell had recently returned from seeing “21 Dog Years” and was bursting with praise.

“The thing I really loved about the show – even though it’s a one-man show and a fast-talking satirical piece – is that it really transcends stand-up comedy and incorporates fantasy and mockery of the crazy modern world,” said Sewell. “Mike certainly had the New York audience in the palm of his hand.”

“21 Dog Years,” one of three monologues Daisey has written and performed, is primarily about his life out West, but it also pays homage to his Maine roots. He learned the art of the monologue, he said, at storytelling events in his home state.

“At the time, it made no impression on me,” said Daisey, about listening to professional storytellers regale audiences. “Years later, I find I think about those meetings so often, and the work I do calls back those Maine storytelling traditions. Maine is one of those rare places that has an incredible voice.”

Growing up in a rural town offered Daisey his first taste of irony. He explains in the show that roads are typically thought of as metaphors for possibility, but that he actually lived at the end of Route 1, and had a regular reminder that some roads do, indeed, dead end. Eventually, he would discover that his work at Amazon was a dead end, too.

But to learn that lesson he had to go down a less-than-rosy path. To hear him tell the story, the initial decision to leave Maine and go to Seattle was based less on career ambition than on a prickly relationship back home. “I desperately wanted to leave Maine in high school, but I went to Colby instead,” he said. “It wasn’t until my life collapsed that I left Maine.” The details, he said, are private, but the cross-country experience became the inspiration for “21 Dog Years.”

The short of it is that Daisey left home and went to sleep on a friend’s couch in the gourmet-coffee, microbrew, grunge-music capital of the country. He immediately networked his way into the fringe theater scene in Seattle. By day, he took temp jobs. Otherwise, he parked himself in coffee shops or in front of the TV.

Eventually Daisey burned out on temping. And his wife, Jean-Michele Gregory, a free-lance editor, grew impatient with his inertia. Daisey needed a real job and health insurance. He also needed a life. So when a representative from Amazon.com recruited him, he signed on first in customer service and quickly advanced to the business development. It wasn’t long before he was consumed with and by 80-hour weeks, the dot-com frenzy and company picnics. He was drawn in by the revolutionary “new economy” and the possibility that business could change the world. The whirl of the lifestyle caught him and Gregory (who directed “21 Dog Years”) by surprise. It also caught them staring into the cold, focused eye of corporate America and the imperative to grow, sell, produce.

“I was sucked in immediately,” said Daisey, who was eating Mexican food after the show one recent night in New York City. “But then it became more and more clear that, to sell the company, a sleight of hand was happening. I started to lose my faith in Amazon’s invincibility and the promise that we could change the world.”

With that realization, Daisey tendered his resignation with the mega book-seller and sold his stocks. First, he sunk into a drunken depression. Then, he and Gregory took off for Spain. When they returned to Seattle, Daisey wrote “21 Dog Years.”

The show was an immediate success and Daisey won national attention for his raging, ravaging, wry depiction of superficiality, self-deception and greed in the dot-com fast lane. He was offered a book deal, which gave the show the legs it needed to do the Fringe Festival in New York City and eventually to Cherry Lane, where it met with favorable reviews from The New York Times, which dubbed Daisey a “comic philospher,” and The New York Daily News, which called Daisey a “natural comic.” Posters of his portly face – and a dog bone in his mouth – are plastered throughout New York.

“It’s a perverse love story,” said Daisey, who is 29 and now lives in Brooklyn. “It’s the tracking of an unrequited love.”

Daisey’s love for Maine, however, is very much intact, and you can see the warm spot he has for his home state when he talks about it. “The older I get, the closer I sound to a Maine storyteller,” said Daisey, “and the more I yearn to come back.”

His father, Bob Daisey, a psychiatric social worker in Bangor, described his son as having “a very powerful personality” from the beginning. So the younger Daisey’s search for professional satisfaction would naturally carry him to new places.

Predictably, Daisey is plotting his next move. He hates acting, he says. But, strictly speaking, “21 Dog Years” isn’t a forum for acting. It is, indeed, storytelling – laced with lunacy and mania and lighting effects. “I don’t try to reconcile my work with the fact that I hate acting,” said Daisey. “Like a lot of the other elements of my art, it exists in friction. I’m a smart person. And I’m a funny person. I don’t try to reconcile that onstage. The audience feeds me, and I love the performing.”

Perhaps the film deal will come through. Maybe the offers to do TV roles will pan out. In the meantime, Daisey is at Cherry Lane Theatre, where, after the show, he appears in the lobby to meet the audience and sign copies of his new book – a more formal account of the show’s material.

And as if Daisey weren’t funny and ironic enough, the book is for sale online at Amazon.com.