Charles
Isherwood

February 18, 2015

“I doubt my life is so interesting anyone would want to read about it,” says the heroine of Verité, a new play by Nick Jones that opened on Wednesday at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater. The confession seems radical, even heretical in today’s culture, when a book or three, or several seasons of reality television, could conceivably hang on a recalcitrant hangnail. Mr. Jones’s play, a comedy-drama that bleeds uncertainly into dark fantasy, deftly satirizes the mania for memoirs that has felled so many trees and fired up so many Kindles. Jo, played by the magnetic Anna Camp (True Blood), has worked for years on a dragons-and-dwarfs saga that seems to be going nowhere. Out of the blue, she’s called to a meeting with a publishing company run by a pair of amusingly accented men — Norwegians, apparently — who briskly inform her that while they are not interested in buying “Dragonscape,” they are intrigued by her voice, both “raw” and “fresh.” Almost interchangeable in their shiny suits, with similarly perky demeanors, Andreas (Robert Sella) and Sven (Matt McGrath) evince an eerie conviction to sign up Jo for a book about her own life, although what they already know of it — she resides with her husband, Josh (Danny Wolohan), and son, Lincoln (Oliver Hollmann), in Paterson, N.J. — would not to make for gripping reading.