The Lifespan of a Fact

Directed by John Williams | Elevator Pitch Theatre
Arts and Culture Centre, Barbara Barrett Theatre | February 6-8, 2025 | Tickets here

Reviewed by Drew Brown

What is the relationship, exactly, between what is factual and what is true? It’s not an easy question to answer. When does a group of trees become a forest? Where does the brain end and the mind begin? Why would someone on the threshold of life want to leap eleven hundred feet down to their death? Trying to disentangle these threads will just as often create new and even tighter knots—which is the last thing you need when you’re working on a deadline.

This fine and blurry line between facts and truth is at the heart of the deep and delightful journalism procedural The Lifespan of a Fact, a debut production from Elevator Pitch currently playing at the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s. It’s a strong start, and it bodes well for whatever else Elevator Pitch has in the works.

Based on a true story (and a book by the same name), The Lifespan of a Fact follows Jim Fingal (Andrew Preston), a young intern at a literary magazine in New York who is assigned by his editor Emily Penrose (Petrina Bromley) to fact-check what is expected to be a blockbuster piece of prestige journalism by essayist John D’Agata (Timothy Matson) about a teenager named Levi Presley who dies by suicide in Las Vegas. Emily anticipates that Jim will give the piece a cursory polish over the weekend before it goes to print, but the intern does such a thorough job trawling through every name, date, event, and object mentioned in the essay—including flying out to John’s home in Vegas to vet its setting for himself—that he produces a 137-page spreadsheet of annotations on a 15-page essay. It turns out that John has been fudging so many facts in pursuit of aesthetic perfection that the credibility of the story, and the magazine, is in jeopardy—and they’ve got less than a day before it hits the printer. (You can read John’s essay here; it fully lives up to the hype.)

The intimate atmosphere of the small Barbara Barrett theatre really adds to the immersion. The play faithfully captures the claustrophobia of writing through the night in a race to beat the clock. I can attest to the accuracy of the anxiety it induces.

This tight three-person show is carried by the compelling performances of its archetypal characters. Matson’s John D’Agata is a writer’s writer, so gifted he can get away with murder—and so used to it that he spends the whole play incredulous that some kid would dare to question his vision. For John, human beings are narrative creatures, shaped and reshaped by the stories they tell (and are told) about themselves. Like magic, a truly talented writer can almost bend reality to their will. It is a great and terrible power, seductive and corrupting, and wielding it irresponsibly courts megalomania, or worse; we see John cavalierly telling needless little lies to both Jim and Emily like a manipulative magician gone mad with his own mastery. Joseph Stalin once said writers are “the engineers of the human soul,” and John appears to have taken that to heart—along with Uncle Joe’s dictatorial ego.

Of course, even the most authoritarian writer is no match for the iron fist of the Editor; when he was in charge of Pravda—the Russian word for “truth,” mind you—Comrade Stalin rejected Lenin’s articles 47 times. As the grizzled veteran of an American literary magazine in the twilight of print journalism, Bromley’s Emily Penrose comes in somewhere between J. Jonah Jameson and Ulrike Meinhof. Which is inevitable: she is run ragged between the impossible task of balancing the touchiness of the talent, the demands of journalistic rigour (and legal liability), and the advertising interests whose crude equivocation of all cultural production into “monetizable content” is both the cancer killing prestige journalism and the only thing that makes it possible. Heavy is the head that wears the crown indeed. Writing and editing are two sides of the same coin—the gas and the brakes, both interdependent and opposed—and they will never desist from their struggle.

Between John’s unstoppable force and Emily’s immovable object comes Preston’s Jim Fingal, comic hero and neurodivergent icon: hyper-literal, hyper-rational, and hyper-focused on his job. He is as relentless as the Terminator in identifying every possible quibble with John’s story, from the pedantic—are the bricks red or brown? Does the traffic jam happen “at” the base of the tower, or “near” the base of the tower?—to the seriously problematic: why did John describe the suicide of another young woman as a hanging when she also jumped off a building? Did John really take a call from Levi while working on the suicide crisis hotline? Did “Levi” even exist at all? Jim’s increasingly ludicrous insistence on what is verifiably, factually accurate frustrates both John’s and Emily’s understandings of how journalism works or what the essay as an art form is meant to accomplish, and at various points both of them threaten to murder or fire him. There is a reason why, as media outlets shrivel up and die in the scorching heat of our news deserts, that Jim’s job has always been the first thing to go.

The Lifespan of a Fact takes place in the mid-aughts. These were already the dying days of journalism, whether digital or print, and from our vantage point in 2025 it seems positively quaint—a lost golden age from a different geological era. Even the cursory, non-intrusive fact-checking that Emily initially expects Jim to do feels luxurious, if not decadent, in our current media landscape. We live in an information apocalypse; our cultural sphere is totally fractured, private equity vultures have cannibalized all the newspapers, and the entire North American economy is now premised on outsourcing our basic cognitive functioning to so-called Artificial Intelligence apps that routinely hallucinate bullshit. Elvis left the building a long time ago—well before the current crop of culture warriors and techno-fascists rolled up.

But all this underscores the importance of insisting on the facts as the only staging ground for what we might call truth—and The Lifespan of a Fact hammers this home brilliantly in its final moments. With the lights dimmed and their arguments unresolved, our three characters huddle together to read aloud the end of John’s essay as it recreates the last 48 seconds of Levi’s life before he flung himself off the roof of the Stratosphere Hotel. Everything goes quiet in the theatre for 48 seconds, and the bare, brutal fact of that empty space opens up onto a deeper truth that defies all attempts to give it meaning. In the face of unanswerable questions about life and death, it is silence that speaks the loudest.