Mike Daisey's "Invincible Summer"

A table, a chair, a glass of water. These simple props and an outline of his themes are all monologuist Mike Daisey needs to put on his 90-minute show.

Well, that and his ability to riff and posture extemporaneously. Working without a script allows Daisey to wend and wind through his subject matter with a fresh sense of possibility for each performance. With Invincible Summer - the title comes from an Albert Camus quote; Camus informs this piece at several junctures - Daisey takes on the New York subway system and its associated aura of power and corruption (most of it was built in four years in the early 1900s, though at a cost of 54 lives: today's cost would run $16 trillion, or, as Daisey puts it, "Sixty space shuttles, or eleven Iraq wars one after another."), the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and his parents' divorce.

What ties it all together? Several conceptual nuggets: family, civilization, trust, personal responsibility. Daisey spins one narrative thread at a time, filling out and gilding his observations with comic energy, then hops to another thread for a while, then jumps back to an earlier train of thought or launches a new one. His outline is written out on a stack of legal paper; as the show goes on, Daisey barely glances at the pages before him. While he hop-scotches from theme to theme and back again, he flips the pages over one at a time. More often than not, the pages glisten with his sweat as they're turned and set aside.

Daisey remains seated for the entire performance, but he radiates heat like "the fiery orb" of New York's dreaded summer sun. His delivery can be acerbic, his voice and inflection taking ona distinct Lewis Black edge; in his calmer moments, Daisey sounds more like Garrison Keillor, as he zeroes in - implacably, with perfect deadpan control of his colorful vocabulary - on his pitch-perfect payoffs.

Some of that choice vocabulary is of the rough-hewn variety. Indeed, before the show begins, the ART's sound system gives us a pleasant female voice warning us that the performance will be delivered "in the argot of New York City," before giving us an example of things to come: "Shut your fucking cell phones and pagers off or we'll shove them so far up your ass you'll never, ever find them again." But Daisey's wordplay isn't unnecessarily vulgar: he uses astonishingly poignant, poetic images as often as he trots out scatological or sexual buzzwords.

"I believe that the subway is democracy," Daisey says at one point - or said at the performance I attended, which is no guarantee that he'll repeat the phrase at subsequent iterations. By this, he means that people of all classes and occupations find themselves crammed into the same limited space, and they all have the same visceral urge to fight for breathing room: Daisey references an inner voice urging him to strike back at the press of bodies, saying, "Shiv someone!" But the democracy of the subway also means that "everyone holds back, and that's civilization, the promise that everyone makes and expects: to refrain, to hold themselves within themselves." If Daisey's monologue can be said to have a single uniting theme, it's that of civilization - and the way in which it was betrayed by terrorists, who not only broke that promise, but see it as their place to live and act outside of it. The regrettable parallel Daisey discovers as he post-mortems the shock and trauma of 9/11 and its wake is that our own American leadership has also begun to see itself as existing above, and independent of, civil niceties like law and social compacts.

All of this is linked to the monologue's secondary theme, that of family. Daisey begins his monologue with the story of his own wedding to wife Jean-Michele Gregory (who also directs Daisey's performances), and ends it with an account of his sister's nuptials. In between, he talks about the dissolution of his parents' marriage, analyzes the bewildering phenomenon of meeting his father's new girlfriend ("I flew right out of my body" the moment he saw her touching his father in an intimate manner), and explores the ways in which rational people can suddenly "break" emotionally - and physically; whether it's a mind snapping in two with berserker rage or primal fear, or four thousand New Yorkers being pulverized into airborne motes that settle into the soup at a local restaurant, that theme of human destruction looms large in the work, and with it Daisey ties a close correlation between the American family and America itself.

That's what gives Daisey's obseervation such power when he says of the Iraq war, "I trusted, and I was betrayed, and I was a fool." And that's also what gives Daisey's exhortation such urgency when he prescribes, for married couples as well as for patriots, "Don't go to sleep angry. Stay up and fight!"