‘The Lifespan of a Fact’ Review: True, False and Everything in Between

Whatever happened to the smart, well-wrought stage comedies of yesteryear? They’re not dead yet—in fact, a new one just opened on Broadway. “The Lifespan of a Fact,” written by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell, is the sort-of-trueish story of Jim Fingal (Daniel Radcliffe), a mild-mannered obsessive-compulsive intern-turned-fact-checker for a New Yorker-type magazine. Jim’s hard-nosed editor (Cherry Jones) assigns him to disentangle truth from untruth in an essay by John D’Agata (Bobby Cannavale), a writer whose self-acknowledged practice is to “take liberties with things that deepen the central truth of the piece.” In other words, John makes stuff up—lots and lots and lots of stuff, as the hapless Jim discovers to his horror and our delight.

or most of its length, this admirably compact play is a rib-bustingly funny farce in which things go from very bad to far worse in nothing flat. Toward the end, though, Messrs. Kareken, Murrell and Farrell skillfully modulate into a darker key as Jim and his colleagues grapple with what it means for journalists to make stuff up in a fact-challenged world: “When the blogs and the fan sites and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit and whatever in the whole, insane internet—when they start tearing you down brick by red brick, they’re not going to say ‘Wow, John D’Agata altered certain details in the service of poetic truth.’ They’re going to say, ‘Wow, John D’Agata lied.’” While you may not buy the surprise ending—about which I can say nothing here for fear of giving away the game—you’ll like everything else about “The Lifespan of a Fact,” including the letter-perfect acting, Leigh Silverman’s snappy direction and Mimi Lien’s quick-change set.