“Truth or Consequences”
When I was in junior high my friend Lester was so annoyed by
my constant reference to trivial facts that he dubbed me “Sam Factual.” The
nickname didn’t stick but my obsession with facts did, leading me to a career
in academia, two appearances on Jeopardy,
and the publication of a slew of books and the editing of a major academic
journal. Some of what I published was actually examined, if only cursorily, by professional
fact-checkers. 
It’s by a trio of writers, credited in the program as “Jeremy
Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell,” whose source is a 2012 nonfiction
book of the same title by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal,
who happen to be two of the play’s characters. The play is based closely on the
book’s many e-mails and comments surrounding D’Agata’s essay, “What Happens
There,” written in 2003 but first published in 2010.
When we first meet Fingal (Radcliffe), he’s a speed-talking,
nervously ambitious, young intern at a New York magazine whose classy-looking editor,
Emily (Jones)—nicely garbed by costumer Linda Cho—gives him a midweek assignment
requiring him to fact-check an essay by respected writer John D’Agata
(Cannavale) by the following Monday morning.
The essay—D’Agata insists on that word, not “article”—is about
suicide in Las Vegas, with particular reference to the death of a teen named
Levi Presley who leaped from the roof of the Stratosphere Hotel. The Harvard-educated
Fingal goes way beyond what Emily envisioned, taking his responsibilities to
the extreme, compiling a stack of notes that is way longer than the essay
itself, and even showing up at the writer’s Vegas home for clarification and
correction.
D’Agata is initially arrogant and defensive, but Fingal keeps harping on the
need for factual accuracy in even the most seemingly minor details: the number
of Vegas strip clubs, the color of the bricks on the Strip, how many
seconds it took for Presley to fall, etc.
D’Agata expostulates on his creative freedom as a writer to bend
the facts on behalf of literary style and emotional accuracy, and the play becomes
a debate over the principles of objective reportage versus artistic liberty in
search of a higher truth. Things become troubled enough that the frustrated Emily
flies out to Vegas to adjudicate the dispute, with all three working through
the night to put the essay’s many worms back in their can. 
Serious as the subject is, and heated as it often gets, the
play starts off as often being very funny, sometimes even verging on farce. The
laughs gradually diminish, though, as it settles into more serious territory,
creating an uneasy balance between comedy and drama. And much as it’s interesting
to hear the arguments play out, there’s little one can approve in John’s colorful
rhetoric defending his creative approach to the facts.
Fingal may be a poster boy for fact-checkers who border on
OCD but, given the way the any reporter, celebrity, politician, or publication today
must fear being outed for even innocent exaggerations or mistakes, nonfiction writers
with literary aspirations must labor to combine those with information as honest
and well-sourced as possible.
Leigh Silverman directs with brisk authority but, for all
the play’s basis in real life, it often seems more fake than real, suggesting
that its own authenticity needs fact-checking. Some of it is obviously fake, like
the five-day deadline premise; various details about John’s life and career; or
Emily’s unnamed magazine, which is said to have been around for over half a
century, although the magazine that eventually published John’s story was The Believer,
founded in San Francisco in 2003. In a sense, the play is a dramatized example
of John D’Agata’s writing philosophy. 
Moreover, John’s story about a suicide never rises to the
level of importance everyone in the play seems to bestow on it. Nor do the writers solve the classic playwriting
problem of how to get people offstage convincingly so others can have private
conversations.
Visually, the play is an uncomfortable mashup. It begins in a
sleekly modern world, given a high-tech gloss by Mimi Lien’s simplified setting,
Jen Schriever’s lighting, and Lucy Mackinnon’s projections. When the bulk of the
action moves to D’Agata’s surprisingly dumpy home, though, we’re suddenly faced
with a typical sitcom environment, as if we’re in a Neil Simon comedy. Which,
come to think of it, the play often suggests, as in a scene when Jim hides in what
Emily thinks is the basement but is actually a closet. 
Jones and Cannavale, whose voice sounded rather hoarse the
night I went, bring their expected charisma to Emily and John, she being appropriately
desperate while always in control, he doing his gruff, machismo thing as the self-centered
writer. Neither, however, offers anything we haven’t seen from them before, and
both occasionally play more to the audience than to one another.
It’s Radcliffe—despite speaking so rapidly at times his
words get muffled—who provides the most honest performance, with his nerdy, politely
insistent demand for factual correctness. He’s also mastered a perfectly
believable American accent.
This being a limited engagement, the lifespan of The Lifespan of a Fact will itself not
be very long, with a scheduled closing on January 13, only weeks away. And that’s
a fact.
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
Studio 54
254 W. 54th St., NYC
Through January 13