I was just listening to an episode of This American Life where Ira Glass and others confronted actor/writer Mike Daisey about inconsistencies and untruths in his monologue about conditions he supposedly witnessed at Apple factories in China. Wow.

As a writer/performer who creates compelling theatrical pieces out of real life events, I can’t tell you how important this topic is to me. And while you might think I would side with Daisey, I absolutely do not.

Here’s the background as I understand it: Daisey visited China and, along with a Chinese interpreter, interviewed workers and toured factories where Apple products are made. Then he crafted a theatrical monologue where he shared stories about the people he met and the conditions he witnessed. He claimed the stories were true, and excerpts from his monologue were featured on This American Life.

Then a public radio journalist, who has written about and lived in China off and on for ten years, heard the stories and became suspicious (sorry, I can’t remember the journalist’s name). He had, in the course of his career, reported on Apple factories and found many of the details in Daisey’s show doubtful. So, he did a tiny bit of digging, found the interpreter Daisey used, and started checking out Daisey’s story piece by piece.

What has now come out is that much of Daisey’s story is dramatized. Some details are exaggerations of what happened. Others appear flat out fictitious.

The producers of This American Life are mortified. They take very seriously the journalistic code governing their stories, namely that they are, indeed, true, as best as can be determined. In their own opinion, they fell short of that code when it came to corroborating Daisey’s material, and their regret was transparent in the show I heard. What struck me, though, in the episode, was Daisey’s position.

He was interviewed several times for the episode and admitted to embellishing facts and actively trying to keep the producers of This American Life from checking those facts with the interpreter. He also expressed very genuine regret that he allowed his work to air on This American Life, where it would be presumed to be journalistic in nature. However, and this is what got me, he insisted that in the context of the theater, it’s OK to call something a true story that isn’t quite. I couldn’t disagree more.

I believe that it’s OK for storytellers to tweak the truth for the sake of drama. Humans have been doing that since we began telling stories. But I also believe we have to own those tweaks. Films use the disclaimer “based on true events” or “inspired by real life events.” I see no reason why theater (or books, for that matter) should be allowed a different standard.

Daisey balked at the idea of calling his work fictitious because, he said, “fiction” didn’t encompass the totality of what he’d created. And I can relate somewhat to that sense. Fiction implies it’s all made up, and clearly Daisey’s piece isn’t entirely fabricated. But “truth” implies an equally extreme position on the other side of the spectrum. When Daisey tried to assert that theatergoers, because they’re in a theater, recognize a more middle ground definition of truth, Glass suggested Daisey was deluding himself. Not only were theatergoers taking Daisey at his word, but so was the rest of America. Daisey has become one of the most vocal and sought after critics of Apple. He’s appeared on dozens of news programs and written Op-Ed pieces.

Now, aside from the questions that come up about the lack of fact checking by those organizations, I agree with Glass. I might be able to get behind Daisey a bit more if he’d been playing characters in an obviously theatricalized production. But his piece is a monologue of first-person stories touted to be true.

This really came home for me hearing an excerpt of Daisey’s show. It’s thought by many to be the most emotional moment in the play and it was, even over the radio, extremely powerful. In it, Daisey tells about meeting a man whose hand was mangled in an accident while the man was working the assembly line manufacturing iPads. According to Daisey, the man was not given medical attention and was later fired for working too slowly. During their meeting, Daisey pulled out his iPad to show the man. The man gasped because, although Apple manufactures in China, iPads are not actually available there. According to Daisey, the man had never seen one. Daisey reportedly turned on the machine and handed it to the man who stared at it in amazement, then looked at Daisey and said in awe, “It’s like magic.”

Having heard already a great deal about just how much Daisey dramatized his experiences,  and having heard the interpreter who was present at this supposed event claim that it never happened, a wave of raw fury billowed up in me when I heard it. I felt manipulated in the most disgusting way. And while I agree that drama is, by nature, emotionally manipulative, there’s a big difference between the transparent manipulation of fiction and the obscured manipulation of supposed truth.

Of course, all this got me thinking about my own show. Like Daisey’s piece, Caterpillar Soup is essentially a monologue of first-person stories touted to be true. After I tasted that Daisey-induced fury, I started running through the moments of my show, challenging myself to assert their accuracy. It’s not the first time I’ve done that. I’ve done it periodically over the years to make sure that time and favorable audience responses haven’t begun to shape-shift what actually happened. And when I was developing the play with my director, Paul Linke, I was an absolute stickler for telling only what was true. Sometimes, not knowing my story, Paul would suggest a particular direction for the narrative, or he’d presume I had certain feelings and suggest I talk about them. Some of those suggestions might have been dramatically worthy, but I wasn’t willing to go down that road. Hearing Daisey’s story, it’s abundantly clear why.

Audiences all over the country have been deeply affected by the stories in Caterpillar Soup. I have been told numerous times that those stories have changed people’s lives. They have been healing and transformative. Imagine now if audiences discovered that I made them up. Telling my trauma surgeon, moments before surgery on my shattered spine, that I’m a dancer. Wailing into my pillow in the rehab hospital, cursing God for making me still. The magic of Charmlee Park when we returned on the two-year anniversary. Imagine if those moments, some of the most powerful moments in the show, turned out to be fabricated. I sincerely hope my audience would feel betrayed, because that’s what it would be. A betrayal of trust and vulnerability.

I guess that’s what really upsets me, the vulnerability. My audience embarks in good faith on what amounts to a pretty treacherous journey. I lead them through some incredibly difficult terrain in order to reach the golden shores of my deliverance. They open their hearts to my experience and, in return, are rewarded with their own deliverance. To lead them falsely is just wrong.

I’m happy to say that my mental scan came up clean. The stories in Caterpillar Soup actually happened, and happened the way I say they do, as best as memory can confirm. There are only two things that are remotely questionable. One is the moment where Dean and I look at each, after we hear the crack and before I actually start to fall from the tree. I don’t remember looking at him, but Dean insists we did and so I keep in the show. The other is an epiphany that is, in the show, attributed to the second anniversary of the fall but, in reality, occurred on the first anniversary. I tell it the way I do because it flows better in the whole narrative and because the change in time doesn’t, as far as I can tell, impact anything. When I ran this point by Dean, looking for some outside vision, he thought it wasn’t even worth considering.

I recognize that it can be tricky to know how much stretching of the truth or dramatization is allowed in a piece labeled “true.” And I’m the first to admit that the truth is a big place, complicated and contradictory, varied depending on whose perspective is featured. But I believe Mike Daisey did his audience (not to mention Apple) a tremendous disservice. I’m uncomfortable judging him, lest I find myself in his position some day. But if writers create characters who are really composites, or take real events and embellish them, claiming they were there when they were not, they have to make that visible. And I sincerely hope that my readers and audience hold me to that forevermore.