His stories make for 'Summer' to remember

CAMBRIDGE -- Even more than most theater artists, Mike Daisey must always rely on the kindness of strangers -- or, more precisely, on their intelligence, alertness, and sense of humor. He depends on his audience because he performs his monologue differently every night, weaving and cutting and pacing its interconnected stories according to how each audience responds.

It's an exciting, risky way to work, and it's easy to imagine how a packed house of smart and engaged people would feed Daisey the energy he needs to perform at his best. That's the audience I found myself longing for as I watched Daisey's comical-philosophical monologue "Invincible Summer" on a dozy, quiet, ham-sated Easter evening at the Zero Arrow Theatre, where the empty seats were only slightly less responsive than the full ones.

If you've ever sat through a dinner party that never quite got off the ground, you know just how this felt: Maybe there's one sparkling conversationalist, but he just can't fight the dampening energy of the surrounding stiffs. Yet even under these daunting circumstances, Daisey managed to be both amusing and insightful -- so much so that I'm hoping to go back and see him with a livelier crowd.

What that crowd would get is 90 minutes of sharp-witted, passionately delivered talk about matters both small and huge, at once utterly individual and achingly universal. The "invincible summer" of the title is typically layered: It comes from the most famous line in "The Stranger" by Albert Camus, it captures Daisey's shock at moving from cloud-cooled Seattle to boiling-hot New York City, and it gradually reveals itself as a description of the last days before, as Daisey puts it, "everything changed."

Even that phrase has more than one meaning here. For Daisey, everything changed that year because his parents' marriage broke up. But for him and everyone else, everything changed in larger ways, too, because the year in question was 2001.

Of course Daisey ends up talking about the bright September day that brought that summer to a terrifying end. But this is not exactly, or not exclusively, a "9/11 play." It has too much other stuff -- weddings, writer's block, the history of the New York subway system, borscht -- to be just that. And even when it is just that, just 9/11, Daisey refracts the giant story of the falling towers through the tiny story of his own path that day.

When the first plane hit, he was in a Starbucks in Lower Manhattan -- but only because, taking the subway from his Brooklyn apartment to his editor's office near Rockefeller Center, he had impulsively decided to get off halfway. When the second plane hit, he wasn't sure how to get from this unfamiliar neighborhood back home. Reaching the Brooklyn Bridge at last, he was struck by the incongruous flash of disappointment that his first walk across it was not the pleasing touristic excursion he had imagined it would be.

All this teeters on the edge of solipsism, but Daisey pulls it back by remaining wryly aware that his is only one of the millions of stories of that day, and not a particularly eventful one at that. But that, he seems to suggest, is why he wants to tell it: to remind us that Sept. 11 was not just a national catastrophe but a specific event with specific repercussions in many individual lives.

And that, in case you're wondering, is how Camus comes in. Daisey never makes the connections explicit, but there's a critical moment when it's impossible not to hear the French existentialist's cool, crystalline insistence that no matter what surrounds us, it's our inner being -- our "invincible summer" -- that determines our fate. When he was halfway across the bridge, Daisey says, the first tower fell, and "everyone made a choice": to stop and look, to look but not stop, or to keep walking without even glancing back.

That's the kind of moment that, on the right night, can create an enchanted hush in a theater. For that hush, and for the many bursts of shared laughter and understanding that should have surrounded it, I will be seeing Mike Daisey again -- not just in "Invincible Summer," but in "Monopoly!," a second monologue that he'll perform May 1-5. Both are presented by the American Repertory Theatre, as is a May 8 workshop of his next monologue, "Tongues Will Wag." Here's hoping they get the wide-awake audiences they deserve.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.