Playing with Truth

Saving the best for last, Sharon Playhouse in Sharon, Conn., is closing its first season under the new leadership of Artistic Director Carl Andress and Managing Director Rod Christensen with its most confident production. Electrically paced by Marcia Milgrom Dodge, the Tony-Award nominated director of Broadway's "Ragtime" revival, "The Lifespan of a Fact" by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell sizzles with tension. If you're going to be scrolling through a streaming service on Friday night, scouting for a series to grab your attention and keep you glued, head to Sharon's Olsen Theater. 

To lay the foreground, allow me a bit of personal color, in-line with spirit of the play's focus on writers injecting themselves in the story. There's an unintentionally hilarious line that opens the fairly forgettable 2010 romantic comedy "Letters To Juliet" that has nevertheless lodged in my brain since I first heard it. On a work call while strolling through sunny Central Park, a young Amanda Seyfried introduces herself by beaming, "I'm a fact checker [at The New Yorker], actually. It is a bit like being a detective." Has anyone ever expressed such a wide-eyed sentiment? Except that "The Lifespan of a Fact," a drama indeed about a magazine fact checker, really is a detective story, one that opens with a report on a dead body. A murder hasn't taken place, but a suicide. A young Nevada man, 16-year-old Levi Presley, has jumped to his death from the observation balcony of a Las Vegas tourist hotel, and a (reportedly) remarkable 15-page essay on this tragedy has landed on the desk of a prestige magazine, ready for print — it just needs a quick fact check. Easy right? 

The assignment is handed to Jim Fingal (Renaldo Piniella), an intern and recent Harvard graduate, by editor Emily Penrose (Jennifer Van Dyck), with both actors and characters playing out artificial performances that belie the depth of their conviction. Jim is a smarmy charmer, willing to brown nose his way to a paid position, while Emily preemptively basks in the publishing glory she views on the horizon. Played across two sets with only three actors, it's Jonathan Walker's excellently grounded turn as the gruff but deeply humane writer, John D'Agata, that turns the play into a more slippery and complicated creature. Bringing out the prickly fury that simmers beneath the initial facades of Piniella and Van Dyck's character work, Walker anchors the production as a man accused of burying a life in an effort to immortalize a death.

Like any good detective story, I have purposefully concealed a piece of important information, just in case you haven't put the pieces together. The play is an adaptation of a 2012 book co-authored by John D'Agata and Jim Fingal, who really did dispute over the questionable truths and literary licenses taken in an essay initially submitted to Harper's Magazine and later to The Believer about Levi Presley, a real teenage boy who scaled two fences on the 109th floor of the Stratosphere Tower and leaped to his death on a Saturday night in July 2002. Published in 2012, "The Lifespan of A Fact," the original essay by creative non-fiction essayist D'Agata, a writer the late David Foster Wallace described as possessing the candor of David Shields and the aesthetic weight of Annie Dillard, is printed alongside his combative conversations with Believer intern, Fingal. 

"Hi, John. I'm the intern who's been assigned to fact-check your article," their correspondence began, as it does in the play. "I was hoping you could clarify how you determined that there are thirty-four strip clubs in the city while the source you're using says thirty-one." But that's the thing about a detective story, isn't it? Pull one thread, and you never know what could unravel.