Fact Check: Curious Theatre Company Delivers Comedic Thought Provoker

What is a fact? Who determines what’s fake news versus simply what’s up for interpretation? After an 18 month, pandemic-forced hiatus, Denver’s Curious Theatre Company is back in business and is exploring the nuance of truth with The Lifespan of a Fact.

The performing arts space is a creative haven, a glistening gem located on the corner of Acoma Street and West 11th Avenue (just behind Torchy’s Tacos, in case you’re looking for a pre-show dinner spot). For anyone familiar with the body of work that Curious showcases, the plays are progressive, culturally relevant, and unwavering in their ethos of “no guts, no story.” Featuring playwrights of color, LGBTQ-identified folks, and women, the theatre company is unapologetic in tackling issues of race, sexism, bias, and discrimination, and The Lifespan of a Fact continues to push the boundaries outside of groupthink and into the grey of individualistic reflection.

The play, written by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell, is based on the real-life events of author John D’Agata experience of butting heads with real-life fact-checker Jim Fingal. The laugh-out-loud comedy brings with it an edge of anxiety, as we watch these characters hash out the details and draw lines in the sand between the freedom of artistic voice and the dedication to firmly planting in reality. What is lost if the writer is forced to stick to fact, and what is fact if not the communication of an event, and without an orator, or author, how are stories, ideas, or convictions ever established?

D’Agata, ostentatiously yet convincingly played by actor William Hahn, gets lost in his own fluid use of language, choosing to embellish, bend, and downright re-write history in his essay of a young, Las Vegas teenager who died by suicide. Fact-checker Fingal, played by the cleverly restless and discerning John Hauser, picks the essay apart line by line, breathing reality into D’Agata’s imaginative, albeit necessary, tale of heartache and loss. Caught in the middle is Emily Penrose, played by the spiritedly poised and cheeky Sheryl McCallum, the editor who assigned the essay to Fingal and thereby introducing the cause of chaos.

The three leads volley back and forth, unfolding a world of robust conflict between what is fact and what is up for interpretation. A blurring of fact and fiction, the energy builds, as the universe swirls in and out of sensibility, and the harshest critic is the live audience, the consumer, who is left to determine which conclusion the tale arrives.

From set design and costumes to projections and props, director Christy Montour-Larson knows how to build a story on the stage. Compiling a team of expertly skilled craftspeople, the production comes to life at Curious and leaves us in a state of both allure and tension; an audience filled with an insatiable appetite for what’s next to unfold.

The Lifespan of a Fact is both entertaining and disturbing in the ways in which it shines light on the reality that we never truly know what we can trust, what artistic authority has been bestowed upon the storyteller and what kind of ethical foundation it has been built upon. Is there truly black and white, up and down, right and wrong, or is it all up for debate? You’ll have to see the comedic piece for yourself if the essay is meant to communicate or manipulate.

*The Lifespan of a Fact will be playing at Curious Theatre Company through October 16. Visit curioustheatre.org/event/lifespan-of-a-fact/ for tickets.