Truth & truthiness
‘Lifespan of a Fact’ explores both
‘T ruth isn’t truth,” Rudy Giuliani famously spluttered on “Meet the Press” last summer, trumping even presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway’s much-derided coinage of the phrase “alternative facts” to explain away a few big little lies about the size of the 2017 presidential inauguration crowd.
Who would have guessed that a Broadway play — starring the guy who played Harry Potter — would argue that, in fact, they both had a point?
In essence, “The Lifespan of a Fact,” which opened Thursday night at Studio 54, is a fun debate play and commercial catnip for the brain, the kind of old-school, celebrity-friendly show you can argue about over late-night pasta without anyone’s face landing in the sauce. It won’t be a Pulitzer contender nor around forever, but it’s smart and very lively.
In one corner is a crusty old writer, John (Bobby Cannavale), who has written a magazine essay on a suicide in Las Vegas and now is faced with the thing that all scribes with miles on their engine blocks are hard-wired to despise: an overachieving junior editor looking to make his bones by messing with the writer’s impeccably artful, brilliantly structured and wholly unimprovable prose.
Worse, Jim — the pesky factchecker played by Daniel Radcliffe at his most impeccably annoying — is a kid. He’s an Ivy League Philistine barely old enough to buy a drink, let alone understand the nuances of story, narrative, feeling and all the other adult-swim stuff that goes into the non-fiction of the Hunter S. Thompson or George Plimpton school, the gonzo essaying that gets you the movie deal and a place of honor at Elaine’s — if only that Upper East Side literary eatery hadn’t ceased to exist.
For Jim, played with relish by Cannavale, niggling details are the festering boils on the backs of works of great cultural understanding. Narrative always needs factual embellishment, he says. Facts are buzzkillers, and the manic pursuit thereof only leads you down the endless rabbit hole of yetmore-contradictory assertions. Story, therefore, represents a deeper truth. Go story!
Jim punches back at his flailing elder as millennials love to do: Democratic society is built on the bedrock of facts, he insists, and larger truths actually are based on getting all the tiny details correct. Errors hurt people. And what is a writer without trust? How can anyone who does not get the facts right be the marquee star of a great magazine? Go facts!
The two men have a referee in the woman tasked with making the decision on whether to publish John’s gorgeously crafted, passionately felt but factually questionable essay in her prestigious Gotham magazine, or follow Jim’s gut and spike the potentially libelous piece of semi-fiction. This Emily (Cherry Jones) mostly is there to argue for the middleground: Pay mild attention to facts, embrace ambiguity where necessary and hope nobody gets hurt.
One notable achievement of this 90-minute show, penned by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell and directed with an eye for comedy by Leigh Silverman on Mimi Lien’s weird set, is that it offers some mild commentary on our fact-challenged moment without devolving into antagonistic insults; it notes complexities that both warring political sides could do to hear.
And, better yet, “The Lifespan of a Fact” makes the excellent point that one of the most acute divisions in the union at present is between those who can’t get past the boring facts, and those who have realized the overwhelming power of holistic story, at least when it comes to wooing Americans at the ballot box. Sure, this is a play about an essay in a magazine, but it’s also a show about the sorry state of journalism, and maybe of a nation.
There are contrivances — the play does not acknowledge that most fabulists, like most abusers, are serial offenders. And its binary conflict does not allow for the truth that even the most fiction-loving writer probably would prefer to avoid being sued for libel. But then it’s a self-aware comedy: at one point, Radcliffe’s truly relentless Jim climbs all the way inside a closet under his quarry’s stairs, delighting the Harry Potter fans in the house.
That is not the only meta moment. The writers based their play on a real essay penned by the writer John D’Agata and the editor Jim Fingal, which was in turn based on their actual encounter in getting an article ready for publication.
So it’s a blend of fact and fiction. Right?
“The Lifespan of a Fact” plays at Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St.