Theatre

The Lifespan of a Fact, directed by Troy Heard, Majestic Repertory Theatre, February 15 to March 4, 2024

When The Lifespan of a Fact first appeared on Broadway, in October of 2018, the very concept of facticity was a matter of national news. Just a year before, Kellyanne Conway, who had been Donald Trump’s campaign manager, defended the use of what she called “alternative facts.” Were alternative facts the solution to fake news? Or had truth just been replaced by belief?

Everyone knows that data can be contradictory. But responsible people typically reserve the term fact for information that is incontrovertible. Opinions aren’t facts—nor are hunches, guesses, or feelings. And yet, critics of factuality always have a useful tool at their disposal: scrutiny. The more closely we look, the more we might doubt measurements, accounts, and valuations. Is a fence 100 feet long? Or 97 feet? Or 96.8 feet? Which description of length is factually accurate?

The Lifespan of a Fact is based on a 2012 book co-written by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. But the book in turn is all about “What Happens There,” an essay that D’Agata had written in 2003 about suicide in Las Vegas. Harper’s Magazine, which had commissioned him to write the piece, pulled it when the editors fought with D’Agata about his fast-and-loose handling of the facts. The Believer magazine, then edited by Heidi Julavits, later stepped in and offered to publish the essay instead, but they first subjected it to a rigorous fact-checking process by Fingal—so rigorous that the essay wasn’t published until 2010.

Where does the truth lie?

D’Agata and Fingal battled over nearly every sentence in a correspondence that quickly became entertainingly ridiculous. D’Agata was too quick to change details or invent descriptions for the sake of aesthetics, insisting all the while that he is an “essayist,” not a journalist. Fingal, meanwhile, was too anal in his drive for hyperaccuracy, as if he were calibrating a particle accelerator rather than polishing a magazine article. In one small but telling detail, D’Agata wrote that the Stratosphere cost $500 million to build, and Fingal counters that it actually cost $550 million. D’Agata claims that “$500 million” is simply an abbreviation “for the sake of rhythm” and should be allowed to stand. Who’s wrong here?

Realizing that their months-long back-and-forth over the text of “What Happens There” potentially revealed something interesting not only about editing but about journalistic integrity and literary value, D’Agata and Fingal published their editorial debate as a standalone book. What does—what should—a fact look like when it comes alive on the page? Where does the truth lie?

The process of fact-checking and copyediting an essay for magazine publication wouldn’t strike most people as especially exciting work. But playwrights Jeremey Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell found D’Agata and Fingal’s antagonistic relationship to be rich fodder for a stage drama. In its 2018 Broadway debut, big Bobby Cannavale (fresh off a terrific run as “Yank” in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape) played D’Agata and squared off against the diminutive Daniel Radcliffe as Fingal. The odd-couple relationship worked, providing plenty of comedic material, and the show was a hit.

Now, in 2024, the play has had a strong run at the Majestic Repertory Theatre in the Las Vegas Arts District. The Majestic vaulted into greater prominence this past year with its original production Scream’d: An Unauthorized Musical Parody, crafted by Troy Heard and Brandon Scott Grayson. Clips of the show, which was initially offered as a Halloween special in 2023, went viral on social media; patrons started flying in from across the country to see it, and the show’s run was extended for several more months to meet the demand. When The Lifespan of a Fact opened in February, it was therefore relegated to a “top-secret backstage space” to allow the main space to continue serving Scream’d.

The intimacy of the black-box format, however, proved useful for Lifespan. Actor Chris Brown’s suave D’Agata squared off against Nick Huff’s gangly Fingal, and the crescendos in intensity were easy to feel. The play also felt at home; after all, it’s set in Las Vegas. (It even has a joke about houses here not having basements.) The city was also home to The Believer magazine, for a time, though the fictional periodical in the play is an unnamed New York publication (perhaps suggestive of Harper’s).

But the play should also be recognized as a fiction. Despite the fact that John D’Agata and Jim Fingal are real people, the stage characters are largely inventions of the playwrights and actors. D’Agata is here a middle-aged literary giant, announced as “one of America’s most significant living writers.” He’s an eminent figure whose condescension is apparently earned. The real D’Agata, in contrast, was only about thirty years old, with one book under his belt, when he gave his essay to The Believer in 2005. A good writer, sure, but not so distant in status from recent Harvard grad Fingal. As Jesse Green observed in a review of the original Broadway show, the playwrights exaggerated the relationship for dramatic effect, “inflating D’Agata’s supposed artistry to Didion-like proportions and Fingal’s tenacity to mania.” The stakes for great art seem higher, and the audience is encouraged to see fact-checking as a potential obstacle to capital-T Truth—even if great artists sometimes act irresponsibly.

But whereas the 2018 Broadway production gained momentum from the Trump administration’s “alternative facts,” the 2024 Majestic production involved different cultural resonances. Perhaps most salient were the recent controversial resignations of Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Harvard President Claudia Gay over allegations of scientific misconduct and academic plagiarism, respectively, in their own scholarship. The publications of other high-ranking university administrators across the country have also come under scrutiny, especially as new software has made it easier to check texts for such problems. The number of academic retractions, in both the sciences and the humanities, has skyrocketed as a result. The fact-checker, in other words, can still wield quite a bit of power, even in a post-truth world.