'Lifespan' Is Just Another Day at the Office, and That’s High Praise

THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT / Limited run (through Jan. 13)

PUBLISHING TYPES The cast of “The Lifespan of A Fact,” from left, Daniel Radcliffe as the fact checker, Cherry Jones as the editor and Bobby Cannavale as the writer, who thinks poetic flow trumps accuracy.

IT FINALLY HAPPENED! AFTER YEARS of sitting in Broadway theaters and watching the adventures of Mormon missionaries, Disney princesses, TV anchormen, Sunset Strip streetwalkers, student wizards, touring Egyptian musicians, morally challenged cops and Cockney flower girls, I went to Studio 54 and saw a play about my own work life.

There are three characters in “The Lifespan of a Fact,” which The Hollywood Reporter called “truly scintillating” and The Washington Post described as both “engagingly trenchant” and “buoyantly literate.” (When you’re talking about publishing people, you have to use big words.)

There’s a writer (John, played by Bobby Cannavale), an editor (Emily, played by Cherry Jones) and a fact-checker (Jim, played by Daniel Radcliffe). Over 35+ years, I did all three of those jobs (first as a freelancer, then at The New York Times), sometimes more than one at a time. So “The Lifespan of a Fact” was just another day at the office for me, and I mean that as the highest praise.

My theater guest, SMP, is a longtime editor and writer too, so the plot revolved around subjects dear to our journalistic hearts.

John (Cannavale, in photo), an arrogant freelancer sure of his every opinion, has written an essay about the suicide of a teenager in Las Vegas. The article (although John hates that word — an essay is something much grander, he believes) was rejected by Harper’s magazine because of factual inaccuracies. (Yes, this is based on a true story, recounted in the 2012 book of the same title by the people these characters are based on: John D’Agata and Jim Fingal.)

But Emily, who edits a fading literary magazine, wants to run it — she’s older, print journalism’s heyday is ending, and it could be her “legacy piece,” she thinks — and calls on Jim, a young (barely out of Harvard) fact checker. She gives him a double message: “Confirm every detail” and “We need to make a good-faith effort.”

VOICE OF REASON Cherry Jones as the arbiter of the moral dilemma. Jones has two best actress Tony Awards, for “The Heiress” and “Doubt.”

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Jim decides to go with the “every detail” part. And that drives John insane. Emily tries to referee. They all end up in John’s Nevada home battling it out.

PINNING DOWN THE DETAILS Daniel Radcliffe plays Jim, the fact checker who takes his responsibilities very seriously.

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You probably know what writers do. Editors, from their point of view, “make it better.” And fact checker sounds like a self-explanatory job description. When I did fact-checking (on the Times culture desk), it was mostly about checking spellings, dates, quotations and historical references.

My proudest moment early in my career at The Times’s culture desk was noticing that the film critic Vincent Canby had quoted a character in “Gone With the Wind” as saying “I don’t know nothing about birthing no babies.” That sounded wrong to me, and I checked. Sure enough, Prissy (Butterfly McQueen, in photo with Vivien Leigh) had actually said, “I don’t know nothing about birthing babies.” Vincent thanked me, and life went on.

In “The Lifespan of a Fact,” John has made larger “mistakes” as a writer. He establishes that there were 31 strip clubs in Las Vegas at the time of the suicide he is writing about, but he writes that the number was 34 — because, to his ear, that sounds better. An incident took place at a Vegas bar called the Boston Saloon. John changes the name to Bucket of Blood. It’s so much more colorful. No wonder young Jim soon has a 130-page spreadsheet detailing his concerns about the essay’s contents.

In terms of its success as a piece of entertainment, “The Lifespan of a Fact” — written by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell and directed by Leigh Silverman — is clearly a winner. On top of the aforementioned critical praise, Sara Holdren of New York magazine and Vulture declared it a “brisk, disconcerting brainteaser..” Chris Jones of The Daily News characterized it as “commercial catnip for the brain.”

Speaking of brains: Why are we even having this debate, people? When John says, “I’m not interested in accuracy; I’m interested in truth,” I have to roll my eyes. Tell me more, John, about your doctorate in philosophy from Oxford. When he suggests “The wrong facts get in the way of the story,” I want to reply: Then maybe the story isn’t completely true.

Jim, the fact checker, confronts John with “You undermine society’s trust in itself.” But the theater critics themselves have made the argument much more directly than the script does. They’re allowed to.

In Variety, Marilyn Stasio defined the battle as “the ethics of factual truth versus the beauty of literary dishonesty.” What is at stake, Peter Marks explained in The Washington Post, is “our collective trust in an objective reality on which we can all agree.” And in The Daily News, Chris Jones summed up the whole situation: “Larger truths actually are based on getting all the tiny details correct.”

To which let me add a piece of advice to wordsmiths who can’t or won’t grasp that last quotation and who want to type in names and places and colors and quotes that “feel” right to them but don’t actually exist in the real world:

Write fiction.

“The Lifespan of a Fact,” Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, lifespanofafact.com. 1 hour 25 minutes (no intermission). Limited run. Opened on Oct. 18, 2018. Closes on Jan. 13, 2019..