Sunday, January 06, 2019

When Fact Checking Goes South

January 6, 2019
   It was a cold day in New York City, at least for a shivering Sonoran Desert couple who traipsed up Broadway to a cold marquee on West 54th Street.



   Past the Naked Cowboy on Times Square (why I didn't think to stop and get a photo with him is a huge regret).

   Kathy booked us for a play called "The Lifespan of A Fact," which I knew zero about.

   Turns out, the play is about a proposed magazine article, written by a creative, but touchy writer (think The Top Secret Writer) who insists it's not an article but an "essay," and his put upon editor, and a millennial—and a rabidly-over-zealous—fact checker assigned the task of finding errors and false statements in the proposed article and correcting them. This may sound thin, but it is a brilliant, and, by turns, hilarious take down of art vs. commerce, small facts being subverted to tell a bigger truth, or whether that is even legit. I felt like my entire professional life was laid bare, and I felt like someone was reading my mail and I openly wept more than once.

   But, full disclosure, I laughed more than I cried.

   It is a three person play and all three leads were just dead-on excellent.

"A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it."
—Ben Hecht

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