The piece draws many lyrical and imagistic threads from Thomas' entire recorded legacy, as well as relying to a large degree on improvisation and the personalities of its participants.

The cast is typically large and diverse, featuring actors, poets and singers supported by a core musical group (based around Thomas' regular collaborators the Two Pale Boys).

Set in an abstract highway landscape among anonymous all-night coffee shops, bus stops, roadside detritus, apocryphal road signs, and flickering streetlights, Mirror Man is (according to Thomas) "about places that don't exist and a collection of stories about the people who live there -- abandoned by the future, forbidden access to the past, and set adrift in a mirage-like Now".

[1] The work was initially commissioned by The South Bank, London, and premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on April 3, 1998 as part of the four-day festival David Thomas: Disastodrome!.

The second act ("Surf's Up in Bay City"), which has undergone significant rewrites as the piece has evolved through different stagings, has not been released, though the lyrical and musical content of the most recent incarnation overlaps significantly with both the David Thomas and Two Pale Boys album Surf's Up!, and the David Thomas and Foreigners album Bay City.