Forward Theater Investigates the Distance Between Fact and Fiction
When award winning playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was writing the script for “The Social Network,” a bio-pic about Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook, he had a very specific moment in mind for an opening scene. After Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend, he goes back to his dorm room at Harvard, gets drunk, and as an act of revenge he creates Facemash – a way to publicly rate and rage against women on campus. In Sorkin’s mind, the college kid who would change the face of world media got out a glass, put in some ice cubes, then poured vodka and orange juice on top to make a screwdriver.
But before filming started, the production team found out that on that fateful night Zuckerberg instead did what most college kids do – he grabbed a beer. Sorkin didn’t care and responded, “Drunk is drunk!” Besides, his way had more drama, more action, more rhythm and sound effects attached. In the final screen version, Zuckerberg drinks a beer. But when asked about the last minute change by an interviewer from The New Yorker, Sorkin said, “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.”
This gray area between the truth and a good story is also the subject of Forward Theater Company’s season opening production, The Lifespan of a Fact, by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell, which is based on a book by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. The play, which had a short Broadway run in the before-times of live performances, is an intense, compact story of the print magazine world, where fact checkers and editors (and even copyeditors!) once pored over a manuscript looking for grammatical, stylistic and factual errors before committing it to print.
In this case, publishing executive Emily (a harried Mary MacDonald Kerr) has only a few days to turn around an essay on teen suicide in Las Vegas from one of her favorite writers. She asks for volunteers from the intern pool to work over the weekend, and the nerdy but willing Jim (an affable James Carrington) volunteers for the extra hours. When he encounters a few dozen irregularities in the first paragraph alone, Jim contacts the mercurial literary genius (a grumpy Michael Herold) to try to separate fact from fiction. But as the inconsistencies pile up, both men double down on their positions: Jim believes that facts are irrefutable and trump any kind of poetic license. John insists that his unique brand of literary brilliance can only shine if he is allowed to fudge the details here and there. As the author says early in the play, “I take liberties with things that deepen the central truth of the piece.” Eventually Emily is called in to referee the battle between the tiniest pedestrian details and the largest poetic license, while the audience members wrestle with their own standards for accuracy in reporting, which could not be more timely than in the era of political “truthiness.”
The production is noteworthy for many reasons – not least of which is that it was undertaken in the “make-it-up-as-you-go” era of COVID-19 performing arts. As a three-hander, The Lifespan of A Fact is already a good choice for this quickly evolving medium – its’ hard to watch too many faces on one computer screen. And to their credit, the artistic team at Forward Theater Company has no doubt been watching examples of good and bad Zoom readings and taking copious notes about how to improve the experience for the audience.
In order to keep everyone safe and socially distanced, the actors were filmed individually in their homes and then the recording was spliced together. With the addition of carefully rendered set design sketches by Joseph Varga, sound design and compositions by Joe Cerqua, and basic costumes by Amy Horst, Lifespan looks and sounds more like a play than a staged reading, set against a black backdrop. Forward even mimicked the experience of coming to the Playhouse in Overture Center by filming a welcome from the staff, who routinely greet patrons as they take their seats.
The fact that FTC is creating any kind of theater during these uncertain times is a triumph of art and stubbornness – but the video version also highlights the shortcomings of this pasted-together medium. In a play that consists mostly of escalating dialogues, there is little tension between the actors, probably because they were each acting by themselves for a camera. While they did fine overall, their energy levels were noticeably flat, without the push and pull of real scene partners. In between scenes, the drawings of settings were meant to ground us in the world of the play, but they look like children’s book illustrations instead of real places, which doesn’t match the tone of the piece. Email and text messages popping up on the screen above the actors’ heads is clever but also really distracting. We end up reading the emails instead of listening to what’s said. The same is true when a piece of the essay in question takes up the full screen.
Characterizations were also problematic. Where Jim, the young nobody-turned-obsessive fact junkie, and John, the famous word artist who’s spent decades around the publishing world, should be polar opposites in temperament and passion, both Carrington and Herold discuss their views of journalism and literature like academics. It’s a difficult leap to make when their arguments are supposed to turn to violence.
Kerr’s Emily does grow increasingly frustrated with the situation, but the script undercuts her character repeatedly, minimizing the stakes of this editing exercise by giving her a perfectly fine back-up piece to publish instead, if this one doesn’t make the deadline. It also teases the audience with only the tiniest hint that the story – about a young man’s suicide – might affect her personally. Those hints never pay off.
In the face of an academic argument with very low stakes, it’s hard to care when the play leaves the audience with a supposed cliffhanger at the end. And wherever individuals land on the question of, “when is it okay to exaggerate a bit to make a point,” the play’s subject is wildly out of step with the current national battle between truth and lies, making it seem even more quaint.
Last spring Forward Theater had the completely accidental misfortune of canceling a play about the black plague because a new global pandemic had the country in lockdown. That’s just rotten luck. But this fall they opened a story about getting every last, miniscule detail right in a magazine piece, the same week it was reported that Trump officials manipulated the CDC’s Covid-19 reports to downplay the danger of the virus and journalist Bob Woodward released interviews to prove that the president deliberately misled the country about the severity of the health crisis. The scale of our real-life problems of finding the facts makes the dilemmas in Lifespan seem very far from reality indeed.