When it comes to selling real estate, says dissembling Simpsons regular Lionel Hutz to Marge Simpson, “there’s the truth … and there’s the truth!”
Such slipperiness is more fulsomely, but no more effectively, unpacked in this briskly talky three-hander presented by Sydney Theatre Company.
Written by playwrights Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell, The Lifespan of a Fact is the distilled essence of a nonfiction book of the same name, co-written in 2012 by essayist and academic John D’Agata and editorial fact-checker Jim Fingal.
Liberties have been taken with the raw material, but the core facts behind the story are these: in 2003, the US magazine Harper’s commissioned D’Agata to write a feature essay on the suicide of a teenager in Las Vegas. Harper’s then declined to publish it, citing factual inaccuracies.
The piece didn’t die on the spike, however. D’Agata pitched the essay to the McSweeney’s-owned title the Believer, whose editor assigned fact-checker Fingal to work on the story.
From the first sentence to the last, Fingal investigated hundreds of D’Agata’s claims, going so far as to physically retrace the teenager’s last hours to make sure the storefront names D’Agata mentioned were correct. The final essay didn’t hit the stands until 2010.
From that process, and with artistic licence tellingly applied, Kareken, Murrell and Farrell condense seven years into a few days of escalating tensions between a keen-to-impress intern Jim (played here by Charles Wu), a prickly writer John (Gareth Davies) and Emily Penrose (Sigrid Thornton in her STC debut), the editor of an unnamed literary magazine. Penrose sets the clock running on a timebomb deadline: an entire printing plant is on standby, her staff is working the weekend, and if the essay isn’t ready by Monday, she’ll have to revert to a puff piece on the lives of congressional spouses.
Lifespan was originally programmed into STC’s 2021 season to play at the Sydney Opera House but lockdowns saw it bumped into 2022. In the interim, the 2021 show’s director, Anne-Louise Sarks, took over the artistic directorship of Melbourne Theatre Company, and this production has been shepherded to the stage by STC associate director Paige Rattray.
As such, it’s not clear whose ideas are whose, though I’m assuming (dangerous in this context, I know) that Rattray inherited most of the big ones in terms of design (Marg Horwell’s set; Emma White’s costumes; Paul Jackson’s lighting) and the decision to have musician (and the production’s sound designer) Maria Alfonsine stalk the action, blowing lugubrious lines on a clarinet.
Rattray has had a lot of experience creating work in the Roslyn Packer Theatre, however, and she makes what is essentially a chamber piece work well on a stage that demands a measure of upscaling. Movements have to be made big and swift. Individual physicalities require a touch more telegraphy to ensure characters pop out of the proscenium with sufficient force.
The delivery has a stentorian quality to it even though the cast is miked – but the stage rapport is sharp, the lines delivered crisply. Rattray gives the show the kind of hustle that harks back to the publishing world depicted in The Front Page.
The role of Jim is something of a showcase (the Broadway production had Daniel Radcliffe in the role) and Wu makes good use of the opportunities afforded him, giving us a Jim who’s as sunny as he is infuriatingly pedantic. I don’t know if it was Rattray’s idea to turn an onstage argument into a jazzily rhythmic workout for Wu (which may or may not be inspired by drummer Dave Dockery’s viral drumalongs to film and TV dialogue), but it was a good one.
Davies’ D’Agata is suitably arrogant and prickly but as the story unfolds, we also see something defensive in him, a reaction to something other than Jim’s apparent attack on his craft. Davies unearths the class outsider in D’Agata, an insecurity at odds with Jim’s Ivy League-conferred confidence and Emily’s uptown hauteur (which Thornton nails).
This is the paragraph where a reviewer might be tempted to draw parallels between this play to ideas of truth and reality in a world of opinion-oriented news, “alternative facts” and deep fakery – but I don’t get the sense of a play big or bold enough to escape its own world. But as a sparky workplace dramedy for subeditors and their loved ones, and those with short attention spans (just 75 minutes), The Lifespan of a Fact is easy enough to recommend.
The Lifespan of a Fact runs at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company, until 22 October.
