Fact? Truth? Savannah Rep's searing new production leaves you with uneasy answers

Theater Review

When I teach a class on the “unreliable narrator,” I am apt to begin with obvious choices like Edgar Allan Poe short stories or Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues.  We might examine the unique use of the first person plural narrators in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, and, always, we will conclude with non-fiction, essays, news or histories. Often, then, the big reveal is that, in some ways, fiction that announces itself as such is more true, more reliable, than anything that purports to be truth.

In the Savannah Rep’s production of the play The Lifespan of a Fact, in its new space at 402 Broughton St., we are introduced to a related conundrum early on.  Ashanti Brown’s Emily Penrose, as editor of a major New York magazine, enlists fresh Harvard graduate Chris Naughton’s Jim Fingal to fact check writer John D’Agata’s essay about the suicide of 16-year-old Levi S. Presley in Las Vegas and the reverberations of that event. This assignment inaugurates an acrimonious conversation conducted via email and then in person between the young intern, earnestly confident in the notion of truth and zealous about checking the facts of the article, and the gruff, arrogant established writer D’Agata, played by Isaiah Johnson, passionate about the essay as art and dedicated to his craft.

The 90- minute production without intermission ticks through the five days that make up the play’s action and moves from the New York office, depicted stage left with Penrose at her desktop, across the country to a modest home outside of Las Vegas, depicted center stage as D’Agata’s faded, dated wood-paneled den with a crocheted owl, tired knick-knacks, and his mother’s old chair.

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Play based on real-life struggle between fact and truth

Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell’s play itself is an adaptation of a 2012 critically acclaimed book of the same title, constructed intertextually through the emails from the actual seven-year debate between the real-life Fingal and D’Agata about a 2003 article he originally developed for Harper’s and then The Believer entitled “What Happens There.“ The article appears within the book in text blocks centered on each page with the argument represented in the surrounding margins in light red, as compiled by W. W. Norton editor Jill Bialosky. The fact that the play itself represents a “true story” and is being produced in the era of fake news, big lies and ChatGPT resonates immediately. And while the action is compressed and stakes might at first seem small, the implications expand to encompass the nature of genre, the value of art, and the impossibility of truth.

The challenge, though, is representing these textual and philosophical concerns dramatically. This dilemma is handled in a satisfying way through director Jenn Bishop’s staging, where we, the audience, are invited to peer in through the window of the stage, eavesdropping on the conversations and witness to the initial emails between D’Agata and Fingal which appear projected on the wall above the modern proscenium.  We hear the clicking of the keys and the sent email swoops and dings while privy to the voiceovers relaying the increasingly frustrated messages.

Before long, though, the wall projections of the emails and the tracking of the days give way to a map of the US as Fingal flies across the country to appear on D’Agata’s doorstep in Vegas to get to the heart of the debate.  The action is now center stage in D’Agata’s den and conducted through an intensifying argument. At an impasse, Penrose herself must also fly cross country in order to mediate as editor.

It is at this point after the text has transitioned to conversation that the raging voices give way to more silent contemplation. In a crucial moment I won’t spoil, it was incredibly moving to have the streets of Savannah play a cameo, almost as if a gesture to the Las Vegas in the play when the voices of a bachelorette party ring out off stage, in the street, highlighting the stark contrast between the loneliness of Levi Presley’s last moments on the roof of the Stratosphere Hotel and the revelry beyond. This moment of revelation at the end of the play offers a stark and welcome contrast to the fury and freneticism that preceded it and is profound in its silence.

In fact, as Penrose and D’Agata, both Brown and Johnson’s concentration ― their intense engagement, grounded physicality and nuanced facial expressions ― is notable throughout, but at this moment Naughton, too, is centered and no longer so agitated, perhaps reflecting the growth of his character. And so, we are invited to commune with these people outside of any text and any language at all to recognize the humanity that undergirds this angst, this dilemma, now extratextual.  Any concluding revelation is deeper, quieter, in this way and will stay with you long after the lights go up.

Staging of shows like this in a space like this with actors like these will be a welcome addition to the cultural life of our community.  I anticipate many of us will be eager to support art that can offer profound truths, even if, as the play suggests, these are debatable and unresolvable, which may be the only truth there is.

Tickets are available at savannahrep.org for four more performances: 8 p.m., Nov. 16-18, and 5 p.m., Nov. 19.

Beth Howells, Ph.D., is chair of the Department of English in the College of Arts and Humanities at Georgia Southern University.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Theater Review: Savannah Rep's 'Lifespan of a Fact'