Mike Daisey writes:

I’ve loved This American Life for years, so when Ira saw my monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs and over lunch asked me if I'd be willing to work with him to adapt it for the program, I felt that I couldn't say no. He had been so good at having lunch, made such great recommendations about what to eat from the menu, and in his initial email he had even begun by writing, "I'm Ira Glass. I host the public radio show This American Life" as though he needed an introduction, which is both humble and charming.

But it was far from easy.

The stage monologue of Agony/Ecstasy is two hours long, so first we had to decide what path to take through the material. Fairly quickly we narrowed in on the China storyline—in the stage monologue the story of my journey to China is intercut with the story of Steve Jobs' rise and fall and rise at Apple, and how transformations in how we view the world make change possible. Mr. Jobs' storyline hit the cutting room floor.

What we cut is also often the lighter, funnier part of the show, and this was a huge challenge—how to preserve the tone of the monologue, which uses humor and tragedy right up against one another, in such a constrained space. We were very concerned about this—we'd review the ideas about what to keep and what to cut, and a lot of our back and forth was about keeping the lightness in the piece, so that the horrors of the facts of Foxconn and the other factories do not rise up and consume the audience, making it impossible for them to listen. In the theater we call it a Brechtian technique—to use humor not to anesthetize, but as a tool for deepening connections, so that an audience will hear things deeply that they might not normally be willing to listen to.

My theatrical performances are very large—I have been compared to Zero Mostel, Jackie Gleason, and Bill Hicks in reviews, and I often perform before hundreds of people at a time. Radio, on the other hand, is fundamentally a communion instead of a performance—it is the one speaking to the one, a voice going out into space to reach one person's ears. It is so wildly different performatively that I was afraid if I shrank down the performance I would lose the essential rhythms and tones the piece is made of, and from TAL’s side they were afraid the performance would be too big and not connect with radio listeners.

The hybrid form we cooked up was an experiment that they had never tried at TAL before: we would adapt sections of the monologue, and then I would perform them for the radio…but with a tiny audience there to watch.

By making it a recording session with an audience we had the best and worst of both worlds. On the positive side, we had a tiny room with people listening intently, so there would be live energy and laughter, but the intensity of a performance given for the radio and the radio alone. Negatively, it is an incredibly naked thing to perform without your stage presence—to perform as nakedly as you can into a microphone, in front of an audience, and know that the people in the room can see inside of you as you do it. I found it incredibly painful and simultaneously liberating—I've rarely learned as much in a single evening as I did during our two back-to-back tapings of the monologue.

There is also the matter of my language. I speak onstage with unrestricted language, or as the Puritans like to say, curse words. I use profanity to punctuate, to turn on a dime in tone and tenor—it’s essential. So a lot of thought went into stripping out profanity…it wasn’t just changing the word “shit” to “crap” so there wouldn’t be a BEEP, but rather figuring out when the word “fuck” should remain, knowing it would be covered by a BEEP, and trying to compose the sentence so that the BEEP worked well—if one is going to be censored (which is exactly what this is, let’s be clear), it’s important to control the context, so that you can extract the best results from the BEEP placement.

And sometimes the language of the piece was just wrong for the radio, even after I adjusted my performance. The theatrical show ends with a scene where I speak directly with the audience in very direct terms about what I’ve seen, and what it could mean for all of us. Onstage it works really well—I’ve performed it hundreds of times for many thousands of people—but when we listened to the radio version, it just felt too grand. We tried re-cutting it to achieve something, but that only made it feel truncated. The fact is that the language worked because it played with the scale and aliveness of the theater. In the incredible intimacy of the radio, it would never achieve that—it just sounded wrong. We ended up cutting it, and ending with a very intimate scene, because I felt like it left us somewhere very open: a meeting between two fundamentally middle-class people from very different worlds, both feeling overwhelmed by the size and scale of the world around us.

Paul Valery said a poem is never completed—it is only abandoned. I am used to this sentiment, as I work in the theater where we begin again every night from zero, from the darkness, and tell the whole story anew. I found it surprising and inspiring how strongly everyone at TAL embodies this sentiment—I've never worked with artists in another medium who believe this as much as I do. They edited right down to the wire, tweaking and evaluating, checking and rechecking, until minutes before the final deadline, which is amazingly close to when several radio stations transmit the show on Friday nights. If you want radio that tastes like theater, remember the next time you listen to the TAL livestream that the show was probably being worked on even an hour earlier.

I'm really glad we did this. Listening to the piece alone in my empty apartment with the lights off was a surreal experience I will never forget. It is a strange thing to go from being the speaker to the listener, and to hear your voice come back to you, like a visitor from another country, with a story you have told yourself night after night for years. The voice in the show is mine. It is me speaking for the radio, and I am so glad we worked together to find that voice.