Harry Potter had no sense of humor whatsoever, but Daniel Radcliffe proves to be a master of comedy in “The Lifespan of a Fact,” the brainy Broadway play that Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell adapted from a magazine article — better described, perhaps, as that classier literary form, the Essay — and a subsequent book by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. Radcliffe plays Jim Fingal (yes, the very one), a nerdy fact-checker for a struggling literary magazine run by Emily Penrose, played by Cherry Jones in tower-of-strength style. Like literary magazines everywhere, this one is reeling from tanking ad sales, shrinking circulation and a geriatric readership. But salvation beckons in the form of a potentially sensational article — make that an Essay — by John D’Agata, a ferociously talented writer played to the hilt by the ferociously talented Bobby Cannavale. This game-changing essay is about the suicide of a 16-year-old boy who jumped from the observation deck of a Las Vegas casino/hotel, and it does, indeed, sound like an extraordinary piece of writing. As Emily points out, John’s essay transcends the death of one boy and speaks of so much more: “Sense from immeasurable tragedy. The history and meaning of Vegas. Despair. Yearning. What it is to be human.” But all that power and glory are in danger of being squeezed out of the essay once young Jim gets his hands on it. Bit by bit, word by word, the fact-checker’s picky-picky “corrections” drain the life and soul out of it. To be fair, and the playwrights are scrupulously fair, the piece is riddled with factual inaccuracies, from the number of topless bars in Vegas to the name of a dive bar, which John had changed from the sedate (but correct) “Boston Saloon” to the lip-smacking “Buckets of Blood.” Jones displays the very essence of editorial patience as she tries to resolve Jim’s finicky factual corrections with D’Agata’s impassioned, if inaccurate, “improvements” on the facts. “Don’t get bogged down in the details,” Emily keeps warning the tone-deaf Jim, to whom the “details” — that is, the facts — are all that matter. Their deadly serious but oh-so-funny ethical dispute is brilliantly argued, but when Emily realizes that she and Jim have reached an impasse, she directs him to consult the author, by which she means a telephone call. But Jim takes her at her word and flies out to Vegas to confront John face to face. The visuals alone are priceless when Radcliffe’s prim Jim stands up to Cannavale’s big, shambling D’Agata at the writer’s family home, a perfect stereotype of middle-class dullness in Mimi Lien’s unkindly funny set design. (A sight gag in the second half of the show illustrates director Leigh Silverman’s playful take on the playwrights’ witty material.) But once the writer and the fact-checker get into a lively debate on the ethics of factual truth vs. the beauty of literary dishonesty, it’s time to really sit up and listen. Perched on his high horse, D’Agata insists that factual events are not themselves as important as “the meaning behind the confluence of events.” But as Jim snaps back, “events didn’t conflue the way you said.” This is terrifically funny dialogue, and both actors savor every comeback. Although the writer breaks down and admits, “I’m not beholden to every detail,” the fact-checker is implacable. He wants the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts. If we were living through a different moment in time, the writer’s fabricated but emotionally wrenching “truth” would easily outweigh the fact-checker’s chilly reality of events. But with the leader of our nation stomping on truth as we know it, and the very essence of reality imperiled by political fact-stretchers, the debate at the heart of this play transcends comedy and demands serious attention. In the end, Jim won’t bend the facts, no matter what the cost to a higher truth. “By misrepresenting official and searchable documents, you undermine your argument, you undermine society’s trust in itself,” he declares, scoring a palpable hit. But John will do whatever has to be done to find the higher truth — “the music” — of a dead boy’s tragic death. And who’s to say which one of them is speaking the kind of truth that really matters?<doc-sep>It was a balmy Friday evening in midtown Manhattan when The Lifespan of a Fact began previews; the gilded theater was only half full. Or maybe it was Saturday, with a little chill in the air and a crowd at capacity. Does it really matter exactly what the details were? It does very much, actually — at least to Daniel Radcliffe’s Jim, a fact checker at an unnamed prestige publication assigned do a final read on a piece by John (Bobby Cannavale), a star journalist whose gift for full-color storytelling may not be matched by his strict adherence to fact. The action is brisk (only 85 minutes, without intermission) but the morality is muddled in the new drama from Jeremy Kareken, David Murrel, and Gordon Farrell, based on a 2012 accounting of the incident by its two real-life protagonists, John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. Some things seem indisputable: A 16-year-old boy named Levi Presley is dead, after jumping from the observation deck of Las Vegas’ Stratosphere Hotel and Casino. But whether the deck stood at 1,149 feet, and whether it all synced up with other local phenomena that day (including but not limited to banned lap dances, the world’s oldest Tabasco bottle, and a tic-tac-toe-playing chicken named Ginger) is for Jim to verify, or not. And also for his editor, Emily Penrose (Cherry Jones) to supervise. The idea of subjective truth in journalism — or anywhere, really — has an obvious timeliness in our era of alternative facts, and Lifespan does offer an intriguing story, and three fine, famous actors to play it. But the outcome never feels quite as consequential as it should, possibly because it isn’t actually that ambiguous; John tells unnecessary lies under the guise of artistic license, and Jim is left to be the didactic classroom-pet nag, asking why the article can’t just go with the actual 31 strip clubs licensed in the city, instead of 34. (Is John a secret numerologist or something? It’s hard to know otherwise why it matters so much to tell that particular lie.) The part of Emily, which should be catnip to a stage veteran like Jones, also feels oddly underwritten, both as character in a play that only contains three of them, and as an actual editor following the generally accepted guidelines of good journalism. There is plenty of sharp repartee, though, and few fun in-jokes (nobody puts baby in the corner, but someone might put Harry Potter in a cupboard). And in the last half hour, the onion does begin to peel for John, who would otherwise come off as just the sort of tetchy, one-dimensional blowhard who may or may not have the actual talent to back up his swollen self-regard.<doc-sep>If you think that’s lordly of me, wait until you get a whiff of the play’s ripe caricature of Mr. D’Agata, especially as inhabited by the swaggering Mr. Cannavale. “I’m not interested in accuracy,” he crows. “I’m interested in truth.” Which is why he doesn’t consider himself a journalist (that’s mistake No. 6) but rather a lyric essayist, for whom atmosphere takes precedence over facts and rhythm over reliability. So does that mean he can just make stuff up, or fudge details, as I have been doing? “The Lifespan of a Fact” is based on a book of the same name that Mr. D’Agata wrote with Jim Fingal in 2012. That book, in turn, was based on an argument that began when Mr. Fingal, as a young intern, was assigned to fact-check an article — sorry, essay — that Mr. D’Agata had written about a teenager’s suicide at a Las Vegas resort in 2002. As portrayed deliciously here by Mr. Radcliffe, who has now put the boy wizard persona well behind him, the character of Fingal is D’Agata’s spiritual and physical opposite: scruffy, small, awkward and perseverant. He is a mosquito to Mr. Cannavale’s lion. Assigned by the editor of a glossy New York magazine to fact-check the 15-page essay, he produces a 130-page spreadsheet outlining his queries. Some address tangible if arguable details: Were the resort’s paving bricks red, or, less interestingly, brown? Some are epistemological: How could D’Agata have known what he couldn’t have witnessed? And some suggest that the author has trespassed deep into the territory of flat-out fiction. Never more than now, with accusations of fake news flying, have these questions bedeviled writers — whether journalists or essayists or critics. Mistakes and lies and opinions are interchangeable with facts in the Twitterverse, creating a nimbus of doubt (and opportunities for “artistic” embellishment) around everything.<doc-sep>
Is there such a thing as just a little fake news? Or is that like being just a little comatose? Broadway’s The Lifespan of a Fact, a new based-on-reality play starring a totally-committed triumvirate of Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones and Bobby Cannavale, poses some big questions about small truths. Certainly the top-grade quality of the cast (and the fascinating real-life story behind the play) has us hoping for answers, or at least a rousing good yarn. There’s a little disappointed on both fronts. First, the true-life background: In 2003, author John D’Agata was commissioned by Harper‘s magazine to write an essay that would reflect on, among other things, the recent suicide of 16-year-old boy who had leaped to his death from the observation deck of a Las Vegas hotel. Related Story Broadway League Report Finds Audience Getting Younger, With More Kids And Teens Attending Shows After a fact-checking process, the magazine rejected the piece over disagreements with the author about, well, facts. D’Agata then took his essay to The Believer magazine, setting off another round of fact-checking, this time with a detail-minded researcher named Jim Fingal. The revised essay was eventually published in the magazine under the title About a Mountain, to considerable acclaim. The tale of the author and the fact-checker didn’t end there, though – the two continued their debates and revisions for no fewer than seven years, eventually resulting in the 2012 book The Lifespan of a Fact, which included both an early draft of the essay and the brain-teasing exchanges between author and fact-checker. To say the book was critically well-received is an understatement: NPR said it “might be the most improbably entertaining book ever published” and the L.A. Times said it was “A vivid and reflective meditation on the nature of nonfiction as literary art.” But how to transfigure this years-long intellectual adventure into an 85-minute stage drama? And one that unspools over the course of a few days, no less. That’s a puzzle that playwrights Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell haven’t solved. Some diminishment is to be expected – D’Agata’s expansive, multi-layered essay, for starters, is here slimmed down to what comes across, frankly, as a not-particularly-complicated account of a suicide. The boiled-down play, directed with efficiency by Leigh Silverman (Violet) is this: Magazine editor Emily (Jones, commanding as ever) assigns rookie fact-checker Jim (Radcliffe, convincing in his borderline mania) to get to work on what seems to be a magazine-saving essay (let’s pretend there are such things) by brash literary light John (Cannavale, dialing down his Boardwalk Empire bark just enough). For reasons that make no more sense onstage than they do in description, the kid has only a long-ish weekend to complete the task, and soon he’s flying from New York to Nevada, on his own accord, to hash things out, in person, with the author. An exasperated Emily will join them soon enough. As the nervous but dedicated Jim examines each and every detail – 34 strip clubs in Vegas or 31? Was so-and-so born in Mississippi? Was that bar called the Boston Saloon or the Bucket of Blood? – he infuriates an author pompous enough to make statements like “I take liberties with things that deepen the central truth of the piece” and “this isn’t Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker.” But you don’t have to be Mr. Shawn to know the difference between facts as bluntly stated as the ones presented here and fiction that we must take on faith is as brilliant as its author insists. Nor do we need the invocation of Mr. Shawn as some sort of unreachable ethical template when Ronan Farrow is just around the corner. Lifespan doesn’t come close to building John’s case. The writer-within-the-play (and his editor) can wax literary over the rhythm and sound of 34 versus 31, or whether anyone besides a dead kid’s parents will care whether her suicide came from a leap or a rope, but an audience better be persuadable that such distinctions are not only arguable but illuminating, or there goes the play. And, so, there goes the play.