When the facts don't matter

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on April 13, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

by Lawrence Toppman

The acting was so well-judged, the direction so crackling and the design so cleverly adaptable that I got half an hour into Davidson Community Players’ “The Lifespan of a Fact” before realizing it was based on a false premise.

The play creates a tempest in a journalistic teapot by pitting elderly essayist John D’Agata against much younger Jim Fingal, who’s assigned by news magazine editor Emily Penrose to fact-check D’Agata’s long piece about a teen’s suicide in Las Vegas.

D’Agata insists he should be allowed to reshape, ignore or even invent details in an account of social conditions that led to the teen’s death. How else can his flights of descriptive poetry move the reader toward deeper emotional truths? If he could be exposed as a fraud, thus exposing himself and the publisher to libel suits, that’s a necessary price for creative genius. Fingal refuses to cave and stubbornly declares names, places and descriptions ought to conform to reality.

Any reader of literary nonfiction by Tracy Kidder, Joan Didion or John McPhee knows it can be both imaginative and honest, researched yet emotionally affecting. Only one jerk in the history of reportage has argued the way D’Agata does here, and even fans of Hunter S. Thompson didn’t take him seriously as a reporter: He was an impressionist, not an essayist. (You might put Tom Wolfe in this category, though I always thought he tried harder to be accurate.)

The two men go back and forth, covering the same meaningless ground over and over, while Penrose tries to juggle her conscience and the need to meet a deadline. I won’t go into all the journalistic improbabilities, starting with the idea that an editor would assign an inexperienced fact-checker to a notoriously prickly and unreliable writer to shape what she calls “my legacy story” a few days before publication.

Playwrights Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell freely adapted a book called “The Lifespan of a Fact” by the real D’Agata and Fingal, who met after Harper’s Magazine refused to publish D’Agata’s Las Vegas essay in 2003; it ended up in a magazine called The Believer, where Fingal went over it seven years later. The dramatists don’t seem to have firm feelings about any arguments set forth in their script, so they abdicate responsibility with a cop-out ending.

Director Frannie Williams, perhaps realizing the slenderness of the material, zooms us forward at top speed, pausing for intimate monologues that ought to illuminate the central theme but wobble clumsily at its edges. Scenic and projection designer Chip Decker, who has found a permanent home at DCP after years of service at Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte, creates three distinct environments in the tiny Armour Street Theatre, so we have a sense of forward movement as the action shifts.

These characters don’t grow or change, so it’s up to the actors to give them enough vitality to hold our interest. Vincent Raye and Bobbi Hawk do so with simple honesty as D’Agata and Penrose. Jake McGraw invests Fingal with extra depth, modulating from motormouth nervousness — he has the blurred speech of a tobacco auctioneer in the opening scene — to calmer interjections as his self-assurance increases.

DCP will open a loosely related play, Anna Ziegler’s “Actually,” at the end of the run of “Lifespan” and after its conclusion. That drama, about two Princeton freshmen, takes place at the intersection of alcohol, physical attraction and sex that’s consensual — or is it? — and examines a different kind of social responsibility.

In that case, the facts are in doubt, so truth remains elusive. In “Lifespan,” the facts are provable, and justification for ignoring them in favor of “inner truth” results in nonsense. If the playwrights want us to believe literary artistry and integrity are mutually exclusive, they’ve misread the last 100 years of great essay writing.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.