Theater: Lifespan of a Fact
By Jacquie Wolf
(You should be aware that Musical Theater must achieve fantastical heights to get more than a penny from me!
Lifespan of a Fact at Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, running through October 23rd .
Masked and vaxed with proof thereof we attended the matinee preview of Lifespan of a Fact on a beautiful, sunny Autumn Day. The title of the play intrigued me because of our society’s recently developed association of fiction with fact. While the suicide of a young man is the impetus for the premise this is not a play about suicide. It is a play about meaning and feeling versus accuracy.
A writer of Essays not Articles, John D’Agata (played by theatre veteran Steve Brady) submits for publication an Essay about a “Death in Las Vegas”. The publications editor, Emily Penrose (Kathy McCafferty) is a stressed, rude, and unfocused person with a tendency towards shrieking. She hires a young fact checker, Jim Fingal (Lorgan Marks) for what she anticipates will be an easy job. Confirming the facts of the article, I mean essay, before the publication deadline the following Monday, some three days away.
It would have been nice to understand the characters relationships, or personal traumas but ultimately these are 3 people with 3 very different viewpoints. The essayist was liberal with his adherence to the facts to capture the drama and essence of the act against the backdrop of the Las Vegas environs. The fact checker Jim is appalled by this and frustrated in his attempts to confirm any factual details with the writer, who mocks him and hangs up. Following the advice of his editor to be an adult and work it out with John, Jim turns up at John’s home in Vegas (not what Emily had in mind).
Emily shows up to mediate the less than adult interaction between the 2. They picked over the spicy reference to tabasco sauce and whether the mundane name of the Boston Pub in which it was discovered was factually correct, but didn’t the Buckets of Blood Saloon create a more appropriate mood? There were valid points well made on both sides that I was not expecting, being prone to accuracy myself. We know we’re near the end of the play, waiting for the phone to ring and reveal the answer to whether to publish or not publish and the play ends with an abrupt blackout and The End as if a huge tome slammed shut!
The play touches on ideas of trust as a human necessity and the ever-increasing coastline of truth and nuance as illustrated by Chaos theory; the more closely we look the more coves and inlets and outcroppings there are, the longer the coastline. Delving deeper, seeing and feeling the truth, and also valiantly adhering to the factual truth of a matter, then finding that truth is both.
For my 2 cents this was a thought provoking, good enough play. I want to
say it was better, but it was an enjoyable afternoon out.