A Review of: The Lifespan of a Fact

Running Time: 85 minutes; Intermissions: none;  Price of a ticket: $69-$299; High-stakes world taken on by characters in play (according to the press material): publishing; Theater: Studio 54; MTA lines disrupted on Saturday afternoon when reviewer went to see play: 1, 3, 4, 7, D, F, J, L, N, R, and Q; Estimated average age of audience at the matinee: 60 

Central Question: Can a truth be self-evident?

Many reviews of Lifespan of a Fact, of the 2012 book or the 2018 Broadway adaptation, open with a similar conceit: if John D’Agata thinks that it’s okay to peddle lies for facts in the name of greater artistic truth, then so does this reviewer.

In case there was any doubt, the world of journalism aligns itself squarely with the side of facts. And these days, you’d be hard pressed not to sympathize with them. On the morning I went to see Lifespan of a Fact on Broadway, I had lain in bed and scrolled through the news of another devastating Hurricane that the president would refuse to attribute to climate change and the assassination of a Saudi journalist that the president suggested was the result of “rogue killers.” The top “trending” article on the New York Times app was titled “Goodbye, Political Spin. Hello, Blatant Lies.”

If that makes Lifespan sound on the nose, that’s because it is. And the play, which opened at Studio 54 on October 18th and stars Daniel Radcliffe, Bobby Canavale, and Cherry Jones, knows it too. While it mercifully resists overt references to the state of 2018 America, it doesn’t need to: the current administration’s war on truth runs as an undercurrent throughout the actions, raising the stakes of the debate about truth and fact. But the more urgent the context, the less space exists for nuance.

The book Lifespan of a Fact traces the conversation that began in 2005 between Jim Fingal, a fact-checker at this magazine, and John D’Agata, an experimental essayist. D’Agata had written an essay about the suicide of a teenager in Las Vegas. Harper’s had originally commissioned the piece but later rejected it for factual inaccuracies. This led it to the Believer, where the editor, Heidi Julavits, asked Fingal, an intern, to determine what was true and what was not. Each page of Lifespan presents a triptych: a portion of the essay framed by Fingal’s fact-checking annotations and his correspondence with D’Agata. Both men are stubborn and a little cocky, and neither ever fully occupies the moral high ground. Fingal quibbles over details as irrelevant as whether bricks look more red...