This blog is dedicated to storytelling in all its wonderful forms, and I do feel remise in not having talked about theater as of yet. The Lifespan of a Fact opened last week at a theater here in St. Louis, giving me the perfect opportunity to talk about plays as well as creative nonfiction. (Another way of storytelling I’ve neglected.)
The Facts of The Lifespan
The play, The Lifespan of a Fact, began its New York run in the fall of 2018. Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones, and Bobby Cannavale composed the three-person cast. Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell adapted the story presented in the book of the same title by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal published in 2012.
The Lifespan of a Fact, book and play, are based on a real-life story. Jim Fingal, an intern at The Believer magazine, was tasked to fact check a John D’Agata piece. The story centered on the death of a teenaged boy and explored issues around the high suicide rate in Las Vegas.
The Story of The Lifespan
The play is set in 2005, the print media world is crumbling, and The Believer editor Emily Penrose needs a win. She’s acquired renown essayist John D’Agata’s piece on suicide in Las Vegas and has literally “stopped the presses” to quickly fact check the piece—“due diligence”— and slam it into the next issue of the magazine. She assigns the fact checking job to intern Jim on a Wednesday; the presses will roll on Monday morning, with either the D’Agata piece or a much less compelling story about the struggles of congressional spouses. This situation gives the play a short, high-stakes timeline.
Emily is a tough businesswoman, but she loves good story. She tells Jim that story is important because it is how humans organize and make sense of their life experiences. And while Jim is ambitious and wants to impress her, his dedication to providing a thorough and accurate analysis of the D’Agata piece, complete with a 100+ page spreadsheet and stack of notebooks, drives the play’s action.
Jim finds statements unsupported by the record immediately, many inaccuracies in the first line of the piece. When Emily suggests Jim reach out to John D’Agata to clarify, the fur flies, and before long Jim turns up at John’s Las Vegas home. This change in scene ups the conflict, and Emily’s last-minute flight to join the men as mediator increases the tension and stakes. John needs a win—publication in The Believer—too, whether or not his ego can admit it. He is obviously reeling from the recent loss of his mother, not to mention the stepdown in his career necessitated by moving to Las Vegas and becoming his mother’s caretaker in her final days.
Creative Nonfiction
The central issue of fact versus fiction is not as simple as it seems on the surface. John maintains his story is an essay, not an article. What does that mean? An essay is “an analytic or interpretative literary composition usually dealing with its subject from a limited or personal point of view.” It is a type of creative nonfiction.
An article is a journalistic work, “nonfiction prose usually appearing with other pieces in a larger publication like a magazine or newspaper.” John’s intent is to write a piece much closer to fiction than one reporting events. Many of the piece’s inaccuracies are for art—literary devices a fiction writer or poet would use to provide foreshadowing, support theme, and enhance language flow, for example.
Artistic License is a Slippery Slope
But, as Emily points out, some of these flights of artistic license involve altering the facts about the lives of real people. Sometimes that is important, sometimes it’s not. In his story, John has moved an anecdote about a woman beating a chicken at tic-tac-toe to the day of the particular suicide highlighted in the essay.
Yet that seems trivial compared to his changing the suicide method of a young girl mentioned in the piece. John structured his story around the suicide by jumping off a tower by a young man. John then lists various deaths that occurred that same day, one of which is a young girl’s suicide by hanging. Except, in reality she also jumped from a high place. Emily is concerned about the pain that would cause the girl’s family (and potential lawsuits). John is fixated on his art. And Jim just wants the facts, tiny or important, to accurately reflect primary sources.
The Play, The Lifespan of a Fact
I enjoyed this play and being challenged to think about the murky waters of creative nonfiction. The cast here in St. Louis, Brian Slaten as John, Perri Gaffney as Emily, and Griffin Osborne as Jim were first rate. The play has both heart and humor and brought out hints of backstory in just the right amounts without slowing the action. And despite being about people discussing writing and publishing, it feels like there is a lot of action.
The buzz around this play and the sentiments expressed in the program notes seem to believe this story is about journalism, “fake news,” etc. I think that is a stretch. John D’Agata is correct in that an essay is not a news article. But the play brings up some of the ethical issues involved in presenting creative nonfiction stories about actual people and actual events, particularly when the piece isn’t memoir (stories about the writer themselves).
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