The Lifespan of a Fact (review)

Photo by Jenny Graham

Spoilers ahoy!

How do we make sense of the world in which we live?  Especially those parts in which we are not directly involved?  Sounds like a heavy subject, doesn't it?  Well, yeah.

All the more reason to turn it into a comedy, am I right?  I cannot remember offhand if Oscar Wilde or G.B.Shaw said "if you tell the truth, make sure you make people laugh, or they will kill you."

The Lifespan of a Fact is long (circa 80 min) one act comedy about this issue.  Written by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell  based on a nonfiction book by  John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, it follows the misadventures of when an intern Fingal (Jonah Robinson) for a magazine is tasked to do the final fact check on an essay about the suicide of a young man in Las Vegas.  He takes the job very seriously.  I think few would doubt he goes too far.  I mean, who cares if the moon is closer to a quarter than half full?  If that detail made a difference, sure, but it boggles the mind how that detail might.  The exact color of some bricks?  Exactly how many strip clubs are in Las Vegas on a given date?  

He even ends up flying to Las Vegas and meets the famous author of the essay, John D'Agata (Ron Bottitta), which goes rather worse and better than one might expect.  Not least because Fingal drew up charts to show a traffic jam one witness described could not be possible with the numbers described.

All this about an essay, not an article.  In fact D'Agata seethes in anger when anyone calls what he wrote an article.  

D'Agata calls up Fingal's editor, Emily Primrose (Inger Tudor), who in turn ends up flying out to Las Vegas from New York, just in time to find D'Agata's hands around Fingal's throat.  If this sounds like the stuff of comedy, you have hit a bullseye.  All this is extremely funny, not least the inherent conflict with this frankly entitled but honest and intelligent young man and a weathered, deservedly-renowned writer a long way from being young in almost any way.  They rub each other the wrong way, and their mutual arrogance smooths over exactly nothing.  

Yet, as Primrose stares agog at Fingal's 130+ pages of spread sheets to fact check a 15 page essay, she also spots some genuine problems.  Things that are inaccurate in ways that do matter, which D'Agata resists.  Adding to the conflict, which gets increasingly serious, increasingly passionate and confusing, is one consensus shared--namely, here is an essay of great power about modern life and the human condition.

The deadline looms, one that cannot be changed under any circumstances, and they continue to debate, passionately.  Will nitpickers descend upon the piece, insisting the exact number of cancer deaths that day must be precisely correct or else every word D'Agata wrote is worthless?  Fingal eventually becomes so frustrated he notes there's no real proof the young man in question is actually dead--his body was smashed by jumping off a building and there was no DNA test on the remains.  Likewise, he continues to make a strong point that facts are indeed truth, which means dismissing them corrodes trust as well as judgment.  Well, does he not have a point?  

While Fingal flails around, facing an existential crisis about his most dearly held beliefs, D'Agata finds himself having to defend himself in ways he perhaps never has, and in truth he clearly is in the wrong sometimes.  While Primrose, who must make the final decision, listens to both and fends off both sometimes fighting dirty (at least emotionally).  

It makes for very good comedy, but even better drama.  

The Lifespan of a Fact plays through April 2: Fridays, Saturdays & Mondays @ 8 p.m. / Sundays @ 2 p.m. (dark Monday, Feb. 20 & Monday, March 13) The Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave. Los Angeles CA 90029 (Fountain at Normandie). Patrons required to wear masks throughout the performance.

My Manana Comes (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Here's an interesting detail.  Until I saw My Manana Comes at the Fountain Theatre, it had been a long time for me since seeing a play entirely about what is a "male" world, a completely masculine POV.  Please don't see this as a complaint one way or another.  I just found it interesting, not least because the playwright in question is a woman--Elizabeth Irwin.

The play takes place in and around the kitchen of a Manhattan restaurant, focusing on the lives of four busboys one summer. 

Credit: Ed Kreiger

Peter (Lawrence Stallings) is a no-nonsense African American focused on his job and providing for his family. Friendly, fun, but very highly strung when things get very tough--as they do.  Jorge (Richard Azurdia) is a notoriously miserly worker, here illegally from Mexico. He is sending every penny he can home, building a house for his wife and children--a house he hopes Peter will one day visit and be treated as an honored guest! Whalid (Peter Pasco) is Mexican American but was born here--full of energy but not that much discipline, full of an ever changing number of plans and so insecure he boasts about every single one. Then there is young Pepe (Pablo Castelblanco), also "illegal" and too easily distracted, eager for the day when his brother can join them.

Now, parenthetically, I'd like to point out the really superb job these four did doing the job of busboy! For much of the play they are in constant motion, doing dozens of little tasks, some of them (like balancing three food-filled plates on one arm) anything but easy but they did it like it was second nature.  Having played a waiter just once on stage, I have some inkling of just how much rehearsal that took!

Credit: Ed Kreiger

More, though, they did their jobs as actors.  At first very little "action" happens, yet we are carried away by the forward momentum of these characters, their hopes and dreams and frustrations. No small feat, but vital because the real conflicts of the show grow a little slowly--and then detonate in a horrific slow motion.  Maybe even more importantly, we continue to care about them.  Yeah, Pepe is kind of stupid, Whalid arrogant jerk, Peter eaten away by envy and even Jorge can be both a prude and sometimes a bit of coward--but none of them are villains.  All are just these guys trying to get by, imperfect but not cruel.

Which makes the drama so much more intense.  Because when the sides break down--when the greed and foolishness of the restaurant owner fractures the world of the kitchen, none of these guys is wrong.  They end up in genuinely deadly conflict, these four who were and should have been friends.

My Manana Comes plays Mondays and Saturdays at 8pm, Saturdays and Sundays at 3pm until June 26, 2016 at the Fountain Theatre 5060 Fountain Ave. (near Normandie) Los Angeles, CA 90029.