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MIKE DAISEY has been hailed as “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation” by The New York Times, is the preeminent monologist in the American theater today. He has been compared to a modern-day Mark Twain and a latter-day Orson Welles for his provocative monologues that combine the political and the personal, weaving together secret histories with hilarity and heart. He’s known for art that reinvents the form, like his critically acclaimed 29-night live theatrical novel, All the Faces of the Moon, a forty hour performance staged at the Public Theater in New York City.

He has toured across five continents, ranging from remote islands in the South Pacific to the Sydney Opera House to abandoned theaters in post-Communist Tajikistan. He’s been a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, the Late Show with David Letterman, a longtime host and storyteller with The Moth, as well as a commentator and contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, Newsweek, WIRED, Vanity Fair, Slate, Salon, NPR and the BBC. In a brief, meteoric career with This American Life, his appearances are among the most listened to and downloaded episodes of that program’s history. He has been nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award, two Drama League Awards, and is the recipient of the Bay Area Critics Circle Award, six Seattle Times Footlight Awards, the Sloan Foundation’s Galileo Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship. 

As a playwright, his transcript of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was downloaded over 100,000 times in the first week it was made available. Under a revolutionary open license it has seen more than 150 productions around the world and been translated into six languages. Years later there are productions being staged all over the world every night from in Germany to Sao Paolo to mainland China.

He is currently at work on his second book, Here at the End of Empire, which will be published by Simon and Schuster, and a full-length thirty hour theatrical monologue adaptation of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. 

You can find him on the web at mikedaisey.com, which is where you are now, and listen to his free podcast All Stories Are Fiction, where you can hear many of his stories, on Soundcloud or at iTunes.

T. RYDER SMITH is an American actor, based in New York City. He has appeared on Broadway in “Oslo”, “War Horse”, and “Equus”, (opposite Daniel Radcliffe and Richard Griffith).
 New York theatre credits include the world premieres of  “Social Security”, by Christina Masciotti, (The Bushwick Starr), “Our Lady of Kibeho”, by Katori Hall (Signature Theatre), “Apparition”, by Anne Washburn (The Connolly), “She Stoops to Comedy”, by David Greenspan (Playwrights Horizons), and “King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe” and “The Gods Are Pounding My Head”, by Richard Foreman (Ontological-Hysteric).
Other work in New York includes Sarah Ruhl’s “Passion Play” (The Irondale Center), and her “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” (Playwrights Horizons), opposite Mary-Louise Parker.
T. received a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance in “Underneath the Lintel”, by Glen Berger, and shared a 2017 Obie Award for Outstanding Ensemble Cast in “Oslo” and a 2007 Drama Desk award for Outstanding Ensemble for the 3-actor, 30-character “Lebensraum”, by Israel Horowitz.
Regional theatre work includes the world premieres of “Scenes from Court Life”, by Sarah Ruhl (Yale Rep), “Big Love”, by Charles Mee (Actors Theatre of Louisville), “Creditors”, by Doug Wright (La Jolla Playhouse), and “We Are Pussy Riot”, by Barbara Hammond (CATF). T received a Craig Noel award for Outstanding Lead Performance in the world premiere of “Lincolnesque”, by John Strand, (Old Globe Theatre).
In 2008, T. was part of a site-specific production of “Waiting for Godot” in New Orleans, performed in two neighborhoods still left devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The production was designed by artist Paul Chan, and co-produced by The Classical Theatre of Harlem and Creative Time. The props from the production and a videotape of the performance are part of the permanent collection at MOMA.
On TV, T. has appeared on the shows “Bull”, “Hunters”, “Instinct”, “The Blacklist”, “Elementary”, “White Collar”, “Damages”, “Blue Bloods”, “Nurse Jackie”, “Law & Order SVU”, and in the PBS miniseries “The Abolitionists”.
Films include “Brainscan”, “The Report”, “Happy Tears”, “El Cielo es Azul”, and experimental works by Marie Losier, Daniel Fish, Redmond Entwistle, Lawrence Krauser and Rachel Rose.
T. supplies voices for the TV series “The Venture Brothers” (Baron Underbheit) and the Bioshock videogames (Sander Cohen.) He has narrated many audiobooks, including works by Tolstoy, Chekov, Dostoevsky, William Burroughs, Chuck Palahniuk, J. Todd Scott, Ada Palmer, Claire Vaye Watkins and Derek Kunsken. He shared a 2021 Audie award for Best Non-Fiction audiobook with “Fire in Paradise”, and performs with Theatre of War, and in Radio Bloomsday, the Pacifica radio readings of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.

PAUL WILLIS is a stage and film director who recently directed the world premieres of Kristen Kosmas’s THERE THERE at PS122/Chocolate Factory in New York and On The Boards in Seattle and Sheila Callaghan’s LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING at Circle X Theatre in Los Angeles. Paul also directed Callaghan’s play CRAWL, FADE TO WHITE for 13p in NYC. Other recent NYC credits include ONE THING I LIKE TO SAY IS by Amy Fox for Clubbed Thumb, Aaron Landsman’s OPEN HOUSE with The Foundry (actor), Kristen Kosmas’s CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS with CSC as well as multiple workshops with SohoRep’s Writer/Director Lab, Culture Project, St. Ann’s Puppet Lab, and The New Group. Paul most recently completed work on the short film THE ALL-NIGHTERS, written by his wife, Lia Aprile. 

LAWRENCE KRAUSER was born in 1964 and was a passionate jazz trumpeter from birth unto college, undergradding at New England Conservatory of Music - but was then waylaid by a photography teacher at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, an epic poet on loan from Tufts, and Boston in general enough to convert him to a fervently erratic pursuit of English Literature at the University of Hartford, where he played in Alexander Lepak’s Big Band and met the woman beside whom he woke up one morning in the mid-1980s having dreamed the first page of dialogue for HORRIBLE CHILD (the entirety of the soundtrack for the trailer). She was decidedly unimpressed—the first of many hurdles en (the decades-long) route to final cut. His first novel, LEMON, was the first novel published by McSweeney’s Books, in 2001, and the basis for LK’s movie WENDELL & THE LEMON (2015). Krauser is a compulsive doodler & occasional playwright who spent a cherished personal era  (much of the ’90s) as a member of the wonkrock band Life Out Of Balance (whose song “Someone’s In My Head” can be heard over W&TL’s closing credits). Linda Shirey directed a stage version of HORRIBLE CHILD in NYC in the arly 1990s, and Paul Willis (who plays Horrible in the movie) directed it twice for Printer’s Devil Theater Company in Seattle (featuring Mike Daisey, who plays Q in the movie, as P). There have been a few other domestic productions and several transformative friendships forged along the way. T. Ryder Smith, who plays P, came to us via a reading directed by Isaac Butler circa 2005; Isaac and T gave LK a new way to think about what the tone of a movie might be (somewhat less histrionic than he’d played with previously [see “early script session, for fanatics” on this site]). Meanwhile, LK married the co-conceiver and editor of the movie version of HORRIBLE CHILD, painter LARISSA TOKMAKOVA. They shot HC in 2006, screened versions in 2008 in a basement, a loft, and a stage theater (The Brick in Williamsburg, BK), then moved on with their lives. Now they have twelve-year-old triplets and a finally finalistic cut of the movie. LK earns his living as a copyeditor for Penguin Random House Books (every genre except cookbooks).