Almost any theatre’s season, like the Best Picture nominees for any Oscar year, will be rife with artistic portrayals of historical facts and figures. The names are often household legends, but directors, actors, and writers of the screen and stage who try to cast them in new–and often unflattering–light will grab more of our attention, our accolades, and our ticket money.

And if their goal is to unearth a side of these nearly mythological subjects unknown to the audience at large, there is no piece more successful at the moment than the Off-Broadway hit The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Whereas most nonfiction pieces revolve only around the celebrities and public figures we worship from afar, this one does that but also hits closer to home. Or, more specifically, the tools sitting snugly in our pockets.

The brainchild of monologist Mike Daisey, it documents the unethical working conditions in the factories that produce our closest friends, coworkers, and personal assistants–iPhones, iPads, Macbooks, and other copycats. But because Daisey is a self-professed practicing member of the cult of Jobs, like the rest of the developed world, he focuses on the Big Apple in particular.  Without ever leaving his chair on NYC’s Public Theatre stage, in two hours he turns these magic boxes into guilt-ridden death torture devices and Jobs from a superhuman genius into a mere mortal, capturing audiences and headlines around the world.

And there lies the difference between J. Edgar, My Week With Marilyn, and The Social Network and other biopics that expose a darker side to pop culture icons. They are born out of headlines, and Daisey’s Agony has created them. Inspired by the play, The New York Times ran an investigative feature on Apple’s unethical suppliers, drawing a trigger response from Jobs’ successor Tim Cook, and now action from Apple to monitor its suppliers. Suddenly Daisey’s play wasn’t just a play, it was a scoop. It wasn’t only good theatre, it was good journalism.

It starts with a great hook–Daisey in a seedy part of China passing through stalls of counterfeit videos and far more sinister items, looking for a pirate to unlock his phone. He explains himself as an“Apple Fanboy” who takes apart his computer to clean each individual piece and then puts them back together for fun. Then he gets to the meat: while browsing an Apple blog one day he finds a post featuring test photos from the inside of a manufacturer, accidentally left on an iPhone when it was shipped to the store. Shaken from his tech-induced revelry, Daisey was consumed by the thought that every single Apple product would need to be tested in that way, which means every single Apple product needs to be hand made, and he has never before wondered how the technology he so adores actually came to be. And the audience realizes the same thing.

Then it gets real. He travels to Shenzhen, the manufacturing capital and economic Mecca of China, with a plucky translator by his side. And despite the discouragement from professional journalists, they stroll up to a major producer of iPads, iPhones, and iPods, and talk directly to the workers as they finish their 12-16 hour shifts. He goes undercover as a businessman to get inside the factories. He does research, risky interviews with labour union leaders, he gets access where a lot of his peers couldn’t. Meanwhile, he parallels his own discoveries with Jobs’s rise to power and his constant (and terrifying) emphasis on efficiency and detail, finally asking the audience “Do you really think he didn’t know?”

But because it’s live and first-hand, Agony is engaging in a way that an article can never be. Daisey himself is just a natural storyteller who uses his sense of humour and stage presence to win the audience over from the start. We trust him because he has a face, not a byline. He involves us in the show, asking us to picture suicide nets around the roof of the factory, or a cafeteria that can fit 430,000 people in it, or the gnarled hands of a worker holding an iPad for the first time even though he has spent years making them.

The lines between journalist and artist have always blurred. Documentary and verbatim are popular forms of theatre that draw upon the materials from research papers, articles, and interviews. Shows like Praxis Theatre’s You Should Have Stayed Home performed by Tommy Taylor or Project Humanity’s moving Rexdale youth shelter tribute The Middle Place, are some examples found here in Toronto. Even so, those two shows used a certain amount of artistic license to tell their story. Daisey relies only on his own charisma, an LED grid behind him, and the facts.

It’s not a Hollywood biopic, he won’t make millions (now that he’s giving away his work for free), he might win an award or two but he’ll never get to the Oscars like George Clooney in The Steve Jobs Story or whatever inevitably will. But the success of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs has not only proven, once again, that audiences have an insatiable hunger for the juicy stories behind our most beloved public figures–but that it can not only entertain, but engage and ask questions not even Siri could answer.

ADDENDUM: On March 16, 2012, This American Life retracted its story on Mike Daisey and his show, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, due to fabrications Daisey added to the script while continuing to present it as “nonfiction.” This reviewer is incredibly disappointed in the change of events, and regrets calling the show “good journalism.”

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Carly Maga is an arts writer in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter at @RadioMaga.