American Lives Theatre production about journalistic standoff: Writer's truth is a shiny object that loses luster under a barrage of facts

Collaborators pause while reading the final part of a contentious magazine piece.

Choices about writing authoritatively can resemble Russian nesting dolls. There's always more you can explore, and the most plainly stated sentence may suggest further questions as ambiguity pokes out in unexpected places. Where do those decorative, serially contained dolls of fact get down to infinitesimal size? Is the truth down there or closer to the surface, and is the surface more important?

In writing about a play based on a book you haven't read, and learning from the printed program that two fiercely incompatible characters in the three-character "The Lifespan of a Fact" wrote a book together on which the play is based, you might have to make the old computer-based WYSIWYG decision. The American Lives Theatre production before me Thursday night at the Phoenix Theatre must be considered the ground floor of a story on which this review has to rest. I am not going to ascend the skyscraper and leap off the ledge.

Intern (Joe Wagner) ponders how to impress harried boss (Eva Patton).

Jim Fingal is a bright, detail-oriented intern at a glossy New York magazine (think the
revived Vanity Fair) who's assigned to fact-check in short order a piece by a star writer who calls his output essays and shies away from the designation "journalist." Emily Penrose is his tense, multitasking editor, sensitive to the prickliness of that purple-prose essayist, John D'Agata, and disdainful of the fresh-faced fact-checker's Harvard pedigree.

Fingal is quickly shown to be so painstaking that the long weekend designed for the article to be publication-ready is not enough. He is a tenacious, boots-on-the-ground researcher who ends up crashing in D'Agata's Las Vegas apartment, out of which most of the action evolves. The editor flies out for hands-on involvement in finishing the major feature, only to find D'Agata's hands on Fingal's neck. Healing the rift becomes essential, and the way she does it makes for a heart-stirring final scene.

In Joe Wagner's portrayal, Jim's initial deference to his editor is a tissue-thin strategy on his way to making his mark. His aim is to be indispensable now, in an era of magazine history when such publications seem more dispensable than ever. Penrose knows that well, and becomes increasingly combative even as she realizes D'Agata's shortcomings and the factual flimsiness of his text.

At length we learn of D'Agata's woundedness after being splendidly exposed to his arrogance in Lukas Felix Schooler's portrayal. The writer is apt to link his nuanced view of prose rhythms to his big-picture concern for truth: Style becomes substance if it is magisterially commanded, in his view. The editor, brilliantly played by Eva Patton,  is more concerned with how D'Agata's values overlap reader engagement and how that drives high-end advertising in the digital age.

Writer (Lukas Felix Schooler) gives fact-checker what for.

But the conflict has deep roots in mass-market print journalism. The burgeoning Luce empire in 1936 sent photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee down to Alabama to write about some white sharecroppers for Fortune magazine. The team became so engaged with the assignment that the right-drifting Fortune could not use the result. Released from their magazine obligations, Evans and Agee produced the unique classic "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."

A rhetorically sweeping passage from Evans' introduction seems worth quoting here: "Ultimately, it is intended that this record and analysis be exhaustive, with no detail, however trivial it may seem, left  untouched, no relevancy avoided, which lies within the power of remembrance to maintain, of the intelligence to perceive, and of the spirit to persist in."

That persistent spirit is what the characters of "The Lifetime of a Fact" struggle to allow representation. But as Evans suggests in his lofty sentence and applying it to this play, all those obsessively gathered facts need accuracy even in a vain and lauded writer's heart-rending account of a young man's suicide in glitzy surroundings. Rending hearts soulfully shouldn't have the last word in responsible long-form journalism. 

"The Lifespan of a Fact," enhanced considerably by Tim Dick's two-location lighting design and Kerry Lee Chipman's efficient sets, is directed by Chris Saunders with precise attention to movement and gesture, addressing the audience seated on opposite sides of the stage. He also draws from his cast the magniloquence, feistiness, and anguish of their characters in a script with committee-like breadth and resonance (by Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell). The production runs through Sept. 25 on the Phoenix Theatre's Basile Stage.

[Photos by Indyghostlight]