Mike Daisey’s monologue Tuesday night in Schwab Auditorium was as much about State College as it was the remote island of Tanna, an island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific.
Daisey opened his almost two-hour performance with observations about his trip from Pittsburgh to State College — from the strip clubs along U.S. Route 22 to what he described as the unexpectedly beautiful landscape of the region.
More importantly, he touched on his experience driving around campus Tuesday amid traffic for Joe Paterno’s viewing and the line of people he saw waiting outside the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center. He described the cross-section of people he saw and the odd role that viewings have in our culture.
“We call it a viewing, but we know there’s nothing there to see because what we came to see has already passed on,” he said.
All the while, Daisey pointed out that he’s an outsider in our community, much as he was when he visited Tanna in early 2009. He reiterated that, in both situations, his mission was not to cast judgment on the culture, but to use his storytelling as a means of reflection and release for the people within it.
Tanna, Daisey said, is one of perhaps only a few remaining places where a currency system is not universally used. He traveled there, in part, to observe how a community functions without money and how it could tie back into the U.S. economic crisis.
Along the way, he met with a group of people who had at one time worshipped England’s Prince Philip (perhaps another reference to Paterno), drank a little too much Kava (an herbal drink with hallucinogenic properties), and navigated the island’s mountainous and remote landscape. All of these events provided elements of humor that, without the more poignant moments, could have easily lead someone to mistake Daisey’s monologue for a stand-up comedy routine.
But the performance was much more than that, as Daisey demonstrated with his final story of the evening — bringing the entire thing back to Penn State and State College. He told the story of a man in Tanna he observed beating his wife repeatedly and his own instinct to speak up in an attempt to stop it, even though it was not his culture and perhaps not his place socially to do so.
“Sometimes we feel called upon to change things and act upon what we think is the right thing to do,” he said. “I knew it exploited the fact that I was American and perhaps out of my place, but I didn’t care because I wanted it to stop. Thank you and good night.”
Jenna Spinelle can be reached at cdtweekender@centredaily.com.
