The Lifespan of a Fact

In these post-truth times, as we’re blinded by fake news, digital gossip and political lies, The Lifespan of a Fact promises to be topical, even urgent.  

And the story is true. Honestly!

Real-life American writer John D’Agata penned an essay around the leap to his death by teenager Levi Presley in 2002. Now the editor of a prestigious New York magazine urgently wants it as her cover story, but first she needs it fact checked.

Emily Penrose (Sigrid Thornton) recruits an ambitious young intern, the real-life Jim Fingal (Charles Wu), to do it. The fastidious Fingal even takes his questions into the American hinterland to the home of the cantankerous D’Agata (Gareth Davies). And so begins their furious debate about the importance of facts and accuracy versus the essayist’s artistic privilege to bend the facts so as to voice a more important truth.  

D’Agata and Fingal later wrote a book about all this, and on that Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordan Farrell based their play: it premiered on Broadway four years ago. Perhaps it’s fake news … but it’s probably a musical by now!   

The play is a fast talking, quick three-person drama/comedy which director Paige Rattray has ably stretched to cover the wide stage of the Ros Packer Theatre. And it’s good entertainment for just 75 minutes. Wu is agile and nicely privileged as Fingal, easy with the play’s broad comedy, in nice contrast to the seeming dispossession of D’Agata. Thornton hovers between them, a sharp yet affable classy New Yorker.

Marg Howell’s set of flying walls creates appropriate visual puzzles, and Rattray has a fine inspiration to put onstage the “truth” of tragic young Levi, embodied in Maria Alfonsine with her clarinet.

Indeed, The Lifespan of a Fact reaches an emotional denouement but the battle of the facts between the two writers, while witty about truth in storytelling, doesn’t reach much deeper into character or a bigger world beyond glossy magazines.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Prudence Upton