DCist - Recommended
"...It's all free-flowing, delicious mockery. And yet he also uses this material to muse on childhood disappointment and self-esteem. And as megalomaniacal and bigoted as Disney may have been, Daisey ponders how Walt's own upbringing, marred by abuse, might have fostered the desire to craft a world in which, if you are true to your innocence, no harm will come to you."
WeLoveDC - Recommended
"...Through the retelling of his "first-hand" experiences going to Orlando, Black Rock Desert, and Zucotti Park, Daisey manages to once again make us laugh but leaves us thinking at the same time. You will be left wanting to google Walt Disney's past and learn more about the craziness that is Burning Man. In classic Daisey-style he plants the seed of an idea through his storytelling, the crafting of which he has truly become the master."
Talkin Broadway - Recommended
"...To sum up, time spent with Mike Daisey is never wasted. His perceptions are never less than interesting and audiences never know in advance where he's going to lead them."
Washington City Paper - Recommended
"...You can feel American Utopias striving mightily to be more than it currently is, even though What It Is is quite good. A picaresque triptych of Daisey's travels to the weeklong desert art bachannal Burning Man, to Disney World, and to the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park, the show sometimes feels like a happy return to tangent-following form after the controversial tale-teller's bruising detour into advocacy. It would be worth seeing even if all it did was remind us how funny Daisey is. You can't fake funny."
Washingtonian - Recommended
"...When it comes to skewering hapless souls blindly going about their business, there’s really nobody who does it better than Mike Daisey. In his new show, American Utopias, currently playing at Woolly Mammoth, the bellicose monologuist turns to the ripe fodder of Burning Man and Disney World; the first with its quasi-autonomous hippies ingesting hallucinogens in the desert, and the second with its scores of manic children ingesting sugar in the swamplands of Orlando. When Daisey describes the “sexy tramps,” his campmates at Burning Man who look like “extras from the last two bad Matrix movies,” or the princesses being corralled with Goofy-branded tasers, fairy corpses dangling from their mouths, it’s hard not to laugh until your teeth hurt."
MD Theatre Guide - Highly Recommended
"...For, in American Utopias Mike Daisey offers us our yearnings, as in our Jungian archetypal collective unconscious yearnings, for something more than a new theatrical experience to help us pass the time, or to help us feel hip or even like a part of the post postmodern avant garde. Instead, he offers us our desire for a paradise on earth, but not a paradise of vestal virgins, White Knights, or lutes in C-minor; rather, a paradise of human relations, where our interactions with others are no longer channeled through commerce, propaganda, or-ironically-Mike Daisey monologues. That yearning we have is for simple humane action-response exchanges with other earthlings."
DCTheatreScene - Recommended
Mike Daisey is a rare kind of artist, one who can forsake all theatrical bells and whistles and still captivate an audience via sheer charisma and wry wit. In the Woolly Mammoth premiere of his incisive new monologue American Utopias, Daisey uses his preacher’s magnetism and fierce creativity to examine the surprising, if fuzzy, links between Burning Man Festival, Disney World, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
