On Thursday February 23, I had the privilege of attending Theater B’s production of “The Lifespan of a Fact.” The performance was amazing and extremely thought-provoking. This is the kind of production that Theater B specializes in “material that is provocative, will make you stop in your tracks, ponder, make you laugh, and undoubtedly ignite conversations on topics vividly present in our communities,” according to Theater B’s website.
“The Lifespan of a Fact” centers around two main characters, intern and fact checker Jim Fingal and ‘essayist’ John D’Agata. There is another character, the editor Emily Penrose, but she serves more as a mediator between the two other characters.
D’Agata has written a beautiful essay about the suicide of a teenage boy, and Fingal is assigned
to fact check it. The problem is Fingal finds many factual errors within the piece and D’Agata is not willing to make any changes.
The discrepancies range from the color of the bricks on a building to how another teenage girl took her own life. It does not take being a writer to realize the difference between these two factual errors. But it takes all three characters to decide if it matters or not.
Through the play we see the characters wrestle with whether or not which facts matter, Fingal saying all of them do and D’Agata saying they don’t. Penrose is present to mitigate the tension but never truly takes a side.
The audience never finds out if the essay gets published or not, but in my mind it was crystal clear: you cannot publish things that are not true in a news publication. My car ride home was filled with differing opinions from my boyfriend and friends. I was outraged, how did they not see it the way I did?
Even my class discussions the following days were wishy-washy, and these were journalism and writing classes. Some students agreed that the essay could be published, others said there was no way that essay should be read by the public.
I found myself holding true to my viewpoint that you simply cannot publish things that are not true and claim them to be.
I’m both a journalism student and an English writing major. I have experience writing both journalistic pieces and works of creative nonfiction. D’Agata’s essay would most likely be considered creative nonfiction and not journalism, but the fact remains, you cannot lie. In either genre.
Another issue I held with D’Agata’s writing was his lack of documentation of his interviews. During the play he reveals one of his sources was a homeless woman. No other information was collected from this woman, not her name or how to contact her. There might be other classist elements at play here, but still, he could have collected her name. But he didn’t.
This is common with D’Agata. He did not take notes during any interviews. When you conduct interviews you need to take notes, it is essential both for the journalist and the essayist (which is what he refers to himself as). Not only does this help you keep things accurate, it helps organize your thinking.
I’m not sure whether this lack of note-taking stemmed from a lack of awareness on D’Agata’s part or because he believed he was above taking notes, that he had enough experience to make up for it. It’s mentioned in the play that D’Agata has collaborated with the editor before and the characters are familiar with one another, maybe that is why he thought he didn’t need to put in the effort of taking notes?
More than anything, his reasoning for changing facts is what bothered me. Just because you don’t like how a number sounds (yes, this was his reason for changing a fact) does not mean you can just change it! If you’re a good enough writer you can make anything sound good.
And he later does. Fingal calls him out on changing how a teenage girl took her life, and D’Agata says he did that for creative effect. But he was still able to get the same effect with the correct information.
Overall, it was a wonderful play, and I loved the conversations that it provoked. But at the end of the day it is black and white for me, the essay should not have been published. When writing in the genre of journalism or even creative nonfiction, you cannot lie about the facts.
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