Based on a book by two authors and giving playwriting credit to three authors, "The Lifespan of a Fact" speaks in a notably singular voice. Now in its Chicago premiere at TimeLine Theatre, the play takes a celebrated freelance writer, his editor at an esteemed magazine, and a newbie factchecker through a weekend clash over an essay. As the trio speeds towards a Monday morning deadline to get copy to a printing press in Kankakee, IL, they wrestle with the difference between fact and truth.
It is a fact that in 2002, a 16-year-old leaped to his death from the Stratosphere Tower in Las Vegas. In response, John D’Agata wrote an essay and Jim Fingal, hired to check the facts, did just that until the piece came apart at the seams. That led to a book about their process, The Lifespan of a Fact, and then playwrights Jeremey Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell fashioned a 90-minute drama by the same title that opened on Broadway in 2018.
Here in a Chicago, Michelle Moe directs PJ Powers as John who insists he is an essayist, not a journalist; Alex Benito Rodriguez as Jim, the recent Harvard graduate who challenges John’s loose relationship with facts; and Juliet Hart as Emily, the pragmatic editor trying to avoid lawsuits. As the publishing deadline approaches, all three actors cling to their viewpoints while imbuing their characters with a generous amount of charm.
A script with such complex authorship might have been a muddle but it is not. "The Lifespan of a Fact" is sharp, focused and funny. Objecting to John’s use of the phrase “traffic jam,” Jim draws a diagram of the number of cars that John claimed to be at an intersection. Later John describes the numerically precise young man as “poison to the creative process.” What the script does not do, however, is go beyond its consideration of media ethics and into its characters’ interior lives.
This makes it hard to connect with them emotionally. Briefly, though, the script edges into vulnerability with John, currently living in his late mother’s Las Vegas home. Its fusty, dated, floral décor seems miles from the Vegas Strip. It’s a house for which John bought an armchair with dimensions that didn’t match the catalog description at all points – and which, therefore, was tough for his mother to navigate with her walker. It’s also a house from which she was transported to a hospital by ambulance, her time of death no more exact than the armchair measurements.
John reveals that his mother had volunteered for a suicide hotline and that, after her passing, he worked a hotline shift, taking calls from people anguishing in Las Vegas’ dark corners. For a moment, the tone shifts from intellectual debate to deep feelings for a mother who tried to help others. Emotions, John hints, motivated him to seek the truth, not the facts, about the 16-year-old who threw himself off the Stratosphere Tower.
Had the play brought its characters to this level of authenticity, the loss of a young life might have felt truly tragic. It might have brought us closer to its public and personal meaning, and the conflict between the people onstage might have been far more disturbing. "The Lifespan of a Fact" is playing through December 23 at TimeLine Theatre.
