The attempted strangling that takes place in the latter half of The Lifespan of a Fact is one of the most convincing violent escalations I’ve seen on stage. On paper, it might sound implausible. The two men involved are an essayist and a fact-checker, and the dispute that has sent the essayist into a semi-murderous rage is the fact-checker’s steady patter of questions: Can a moon that is only a waxing crescent (12 percent illuminated) be accurately described as half-full? How long can a woman live in Las Vegas before it’s inaccurate to describe her as being “from Mississippi”?

Sometimes, as the strangler in this three-hander would argue, it’s hard to get a sense of the scene from a simple recitation of the facts.

The Lifespan of a Fact is based on an implausible true story. Essayist John D’Agata wrote a piece for Harper’s that was rejected due to his loose approach to facts in the service of story. The essay “What Happens There” was ultimately published in The Believer—once it had been given a careful fact check by Jim Fingal.

D’Agata and Fingal swore at each other, argued about the nature of journalism, and, ultimately, published their correspondence as a book, The Lifespan of a Fact, which sets their argument Talmudically. Their back and forth surrounds the essay that spurred the argument (which sometimes progresses at the rate of a sentence a page, as they litigate in the margins).

Playwrights Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell adapted this brawl into a Broadway play, adding an editor, Emily (Cherry Jones) to the mix. Jim, a stringy Harvard graduate, is played with a vibrating anger by Daniel Radcliffe, while Bobby Cannavale brings a muscular presence to John.

Pictured L to R: Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones, and Bobby Cannavale
(Photograph by Peter Cunningham, Courtesy of Polk & Co.)

From the beginning of the show, it is clear that the problem at the heart of the play isn’t limited to writers and fact-checkers. As Jim begins his email correspondence with John, he types, erases, and edits in front of the audience. (The well-integrated projection design is by Lucy Mackinnon). Jim refers to the piece as an “article;” John angrily corrects him—he writes “essays.”

Words matter. The audience is drawn into Jim’s role, if not necessarily onto his side, as we play fact-checker from the sidelines. The scenic design for their final confrontation in John’s house makes the contradictory points of view tangible. Mimi Lien’s trapezoidal frame and sloping wall makes the house resemble an Ames room, used to distort our judgement through tricks of perspective.

When both men summarize Emily’s expectations for their work, their language diverges again. John the writer tells Jim, “She knows I’m not beholden to every detail,” as if preemptively excusing any factual slip-ups. Jim the fact-checker pushes back, saying that Emily warned him that John “take[s] a few liberties.” The audience can confirm only Jim’s claim (we just saw Emily say this in the preceding scene), but we can’t disconfirm John’s. She may have made both comments to both men, and either, both, or neither may be an accurate impression of her view of John, or an accurate description of John himself.

The show resembles Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play that makes high drama of epistemological uncertainty. In Stoppard’s classic, the duelists are historians poring over primary sources, trying to intuit the whole from fragments. The audience can see what the academics cannot, following the action in the past as it plays out in parallel in the present.

The historians of Arcadia scour the historical record, looking for, as the character Hannah Jarvis puts it, a “peg” to hang their theories of literature on. The peg is in fact a person, with a richer, more complicated life than their pet theories would suggest. But that’s not always a concern of the historians, or of John in Lifespan.

We get no glimpse behind the curtain in Lifespan. The subject of John’s piece, Levi Presley, is dead. This teen’s suicide is the lens through which John is telling the story of modern Las Vegas. John never met Levi (though he’s not above implying he might have—spinning a call he fielded during his volunteer work on a suicide hotline as not provably not from Levi), but he recognizes in the boy the chance to tell a story he’d already wanted to share.

In the original book, D’Agata makes the case for his methods to Fingal, arguing that his art is impressionistic. Merely sticking to the facts occludes the truth he’s trying to tell. D’Agata writes:

Numbers and stats can only go so far in illustrating who a person is or what a community is about. At some point, we must as writers leap into the skin of a person or a community in an attempt to embody them. That’s obviously an incredibly violent procedure, but I think that unless we’re willing to do that as writers (and go along for that ride as readers), then we’re not actually doing our job.

It’s the question of who experiences the violence of that procedure that brings Emily up short in the play, and seems to give Fingal some of his biggest qualms. In the book, Fingal objects that Levi may not be able to bear the weight of the argument D’Agata wants to make. After all, he’s “not a cultural figure or an icon whose life is for the taking and can be radically manipulated and reinterpreted.”

D’Agata admits that his essay is really about an idea, not Levi, but asks what he should have done instead. Does Fingal wish D’Agata had “completely made up a suicide victim so that I could use him however I wished?”

In the play and in the book, it’s clear he was willing to rescript another suicide victim’s death to suit his story. In the opening paragraphs of his essay, D’Agata lists the other deaths that happened on the same day as Levi’s jump, and falsely states there was a suicide by hanging, when, in fact, the other victim also jumped to her death. D’Agata wants Levi’s death to not be cluttered by other similar deaths that aren’t part of his story, but this is the lie that gets the biggest reaction from Emily in the play. “She is as dead as Levi and you pissed on her,” Emily tells him coldly.

The playwrights’ addition of Emily adds a third perspective to the folie à deux of the original book. Emily is the voice of the publication, torn between profit and prestige. She is willing to run the article if it is approximately correct. (She suggests shooting for 90 percent true, and apologizing for remaining gaps, if anyone happens to notice.)

Her pragmatism appalls Jim, who tends to carry the sympathies of the audience throughout the show. Radcliffe’s Jim is so fixated as to be completely unselfconscious, never getting the jokes at his own expense. At the performance I attended, the audience broke into spontaneous applause at his deepest moment of pedantry: Jim pulls out a posterboard reconstruction of a traffic jam mentioned in the article, arguing that the street is too wide for the number of cars cited to cause a serious snarl. This moment of high-school science fair sincerity impresses Emily less than it did the audience.

Jim does have to handle the only moment in the play that rang false to me. His character delivers a too-topical speech, making the case that fact checking is the only possible rebuttal to cries of “fake news.” John’s smallest elision, he suggests, gives fuel to conspiracy theorists like those who accuse shooting victims of being crisis actors.

The strange thing is, if the conspiracy theorists came to see the show at Studio 54, the character who would validate their fears is Emily, not John. She wants to see the essay published, not just because her backup piece is the fluffy-sounding “Congressional Spouses and the Burdens They Bear,” but because she thinks John’s essay is the right story at the right time. It’s the kind of narrative, she argues, that has the potential to change its readers and the world. And if the change is desirable, does it matter too much if the story is true?

In Emily’s telling, writing is a tool for shaping readers. The art is a means to an end. Her view has sympathizers off stage. Boris Kachka, the New York books editor, argued that books don’t need to be read to be important. In a Columbia Journalism Review piece about the rising influence of book reviews, he said “You can have a blog post that at least draws people’s attention to the book. Maybe they’ll read it, maybe they won’t. But at least the ideas from the book will filter through into the conversation. I think it’s important to get those ideas in, so books can have an influence beyond their readership, whatever it might be.”

Jim would bristle at the deployment of a noble lie, John at the dismissal of his artistry as a mere vehicle for insinuating an idea into the mind of the reader.

The ultimate justification for John’s style is different onstage than in the book. The playwrights give him new ammunition, having John tell the story of his mother’s death (there’s no indication in the book that his mother has died). He makes the case that following the verifiable facts would lead away from the truth. The rules about calling time of death tell you less than John can about being with her and seeing her go.

John’s attack on what Edmund Burke would call the tyranny of “sophisters, economists, and calculators” is his most sympathetic moment. Who, on the phone with their insurer or interacting with any other piece of precise bureaucracy, hasn’t wanted to cry out that their interlocutor has all of the facts and none of the truth? If John doesn’t win out, it’s because it’s not clear there really is an underlying truth to his piece, let alone one that would justify the numerous distortions in his essay.

The argument John is making is best defended by one of Jim Fingal’s marginal comments in the original book. Fingal is patiently adding context to D’Agata’s overbroad tour of theories of suicide throughout human history.

While he concedes that D’Agata is technically correct that “The Talmud forbids even mourning [suicide] victims,” Fingal piles on marginal citations to prove that D’Agata isn’t telling the whole story. Fingal notes, “The severity of this punishment caused rabbis of the time to consider a self-inflicted death as only that which was announced beforehand and carried out in front of eyewitnesses.”

In other words, the rabbis understood that asking for a sufficiently severe fact-check would render a claim unprovable. For them, this precision was a way of sneaking in mercy as a technicality. Journalists like D’Agata haven’t proven themselves worthy of the same benefit of the doubt.