What if the Guy With the Red Pencil Is Nuts?

What if the Guy With the Red Pencil Is Nuts?

“What kind of big fan were you?” the writer John D’Agata asked as he sat in a cozy booth in a sunny midtown Manhattan diner. “Were you a” — pause — “hater” — pause — “big fan?”

I’d just told Mr. D’Agata how much I’d enjoyed his 2012 book, “The Lifespan of a Fact,” which he wrote with Jim Fingal, seated to his right. I hadn’t realized I’d hit a nerve.

In 2005, then working as an unpaid intern for the San Francisco magazine The Believer, Mr. Fingal was assigned to fact-check an essay by Mr. D’Agata, a celebrated creative-nonfiction writer. Theoretically, unremarkable. In practice, a dramatic enough tale to birth first the book and, now, a Broadway adaptation starring Bobby Cannavale, Daniel Radcliffe, and Cherry Jones, which starts previews Sept. 20 at Studio 54.

And dramatic enough to render Mr. D’Agata a villain.

His original article was a lovely, meditative essay on the suicide of Levi Presley, a Las Vegas teenager who jumped off the observation deck of the Stratosphere Tower in the summer of 2002. The aim was to write a piece explicating the feel, if not so much the literal exact truth, of a city’s sadness.

Mr. Fingal was then a recent Harvard graduate crashing on his brother’s futon in Mountain View, Calif., and starving for a challenge. His fact-checking document bloomed into a breathless 90-page chronicle of the essay’s every last inaccuracy. He pulled lengthy testimonials from linguistics-expert pals pushing back on Mr. D’Agata’s flourishes; he made his own solo reporting trip to the Vegas strip to double-check the colors of the bricks at the base of the Stratosphere.

The fact-checker, a presumably mild-mannered figure, suddenly took on the menace of an interrogator. Which goes a way toward explaining how a slim, odd little book about fact-checking made it to Broadway in the first place. There is an inherent extremism in the work that can, at times, feel insane.

In the darkly comic adaptation, Mr. Radcliffe plays a sleep-deprived and slightly manic version of Mr. Fingal. To the sure delight of shlumpy writers everywhere, Mr. Cannavale portrays Mr. D’Agata as a romantically rumpled warrior-poet type. “My family is excitedly reminding me that he’s far more Italian than I am,” Mr. D’Agata said. “My students” — at the University of Iowa — “say he’s built a career as ‘evil with a heart.’ I’m hoping it’s all just heart. And he doesn’t, like, kill anyone.”

Ms. Jones plays Emily, the editor in chief of the unnamed prestige magazine in which the piece is running. A new character, she acts as an unflappable mediator between poles. In rehearsal, she repeatedly landed perfect, elegant curse words.

Though never a best-seller, the book touched a nerve with writers and editors and other people who like to argue about ethics in art.

That included the producer Norman Twain, who originally spearheaded the adaptation but died in 2016. The script is credited to three writers: Gordon Farrell, Jeremy Kareken and David Murrell (the latter two were continuing to make tweaks through rehearsals). And, in a first for Broadway, women make up the entire design team.

As directed by the prolific Leigh Silverman (“Violet,” “Sweet Charity”), the 95-minute adaptation contrives a reason to get all three of its characters into the same ramshackle Nevada home. It compresses the timeline (which in reality spanned years) to a few days, wringing tension out of a hard publication deadline. There’s also boozing and choking and lots of anguish over the state of the world — and whether art gives one the right to lie.

The book itself is even more minimal. Cleverly, it wraps Mr. D’Agata and Mr. Fingal’s punchy battles in marginalia around the text of the original essay. Mr. D’Agata contends that he has the right to change the verifiable number of strip clubs in Las Vegas to 34 from 31 “because the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘thirty-one.’ ”

That’s on the second page of the book. By the end, the two aren’t so much co-workers as radicals fighting for their very world views.

CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Mr. Fingal now works as a software engineer in San Francisco while also running a small culture and technology magazine called Logic. Mr. D’Agata has published and edited widely, including the anthology series “A New History of the Essay.” And 13 years since they first started working on The Believer piece, the two remain locked together.

At the diner, they happened to visually represent extremes. Mr. Fingal, in his mid-30s, was all in black up to his plain ball cap and down to his Sauconys; the only thing that broke up the color pattern was his neatly trimmed red beard. Mr. D’Agata, in his early 40s, was in a natty light blazer with a pocket square; he had at least a passing resemblance to well-preserved Tom Cruise. But in reality, they are not combatants, and never were.

“Since I’m always the bad guy, it’s important for me to emphasize: these were versions of us,” Mr. D’Agata said, over a tall glass of ice tea, with a pained smile. “I would hope that we all have an inner diva in us. I let that out for the sake of the book.”

That persona, you will not be surprised to hear, was not wholeheartedly welcomed. Mr. D’Agata recalled critics “kicking me in the face” and at least one online comment wishing he’d killed himself instead of Levi Presley.

In the same week I sat down with them, the cast met Mr. D’Agata and Mr. Fingal for the first time. In an airy rehearsal room overlooking the billboards of Times Square, all three said they did not see a villain or a hero.

“Actors don’t judge,” Ms. Jones said, absent-mindedly pulling a small yellow lighter out of her pocket.

Mr. Radcliffe, in a black T-shirt and Vans, has been on Broadway twice since his Harry Potter days. He recalled “going from being a person that the papers don’t care about to being a person that the papers do care about” and realizing, “ ‘Oh, you do just make stuff up.’”

He stopped: “You guys don’t. But there are papers in England …”

Ms. Jones and Mr. Cannavale said they had largely avoided that kind of attention from fabulists. (Neither had played boy wizards.) Mr. Cannavale added that tabloids only pay attention to him when his partner, Rose Byrne, is pregnant. “They love pregnant actresses!”

The three had some fun with the meta-nature of our talk. At one point, as they collectively struggled to remember the name of a book, Mr. Cannavale suggested: “Make it seem like we knew it.” Mr. Radcliffe added: “We’ll just tell the fact-checker that’s how it happened.”

Then Mr. Cannavale recalled being boxed in by a fact-checker who was calling to confirm an anecdote he had relayed to a reporter from when he was 6 years old.

“All of a sudden, I had to remember: ‘Was I 6 years old? Was I 7? Was I 8?!”

Which brought us back to Mr. D’Agata’s original point: Why are we so obsessed with the idea of a possibly impossible, absolute, objective truth?

When the subject of truth comes up, Donald Trump cannot be far behind. Though the play is set in the present day, the president is not mentioned. But for members of the cast, his specter lingers.

With the topic broached, Mr. Cannavale, in a white T-shirt depicting cartoon renderings of Tupac and Biggie, got animated. He ticked off Plutarch and Herodotus and Cicero, writers named by his character in the play, crediting them with thoughtfully exploring the role of fact in art.

“Hopefully the play can continue this argument,” he said. “Trump be damned. Like, I don’t give a [expletive] that the internet is always going to be able to provide us with clips of [expletive] Sean Hannity. No one’s gonna give a [expletive] about him in a hundred years. And they are still gonna be reading Herodotus!”

“Yeah, and probably studying the history of this period in America with their jaws slack,” Ms. Jones added.

Rehearsals had largely proceeded with no intrusion from the pair. Mr. D’Agata had successfully lobbied for the excision of one detail in the script: the claim that he was paid $10,000 for the essay. (“First of all, no. Like, maybe Malcolm Gladwell’s making 10 grand?”)

Mr. Fingal, however, had not even asked to see the script. “It’s one of those things you think but never say out loud: ‘As the original fictionalizer of Jim Fingal, I would never criticize a fellow traveler.’”

Mr. D’Agata: “Maybe because in the book version Jim is — to quote somebody recently — ‘the moral center’?!”

Mr. Fingal: “Was that me?!”

Mr. D’Agata laughed. “They’re afraid to tarnish his image as America’s sweetheart.”

“I did feel like he had been beat up a bit by it all,” Mr. Cannavale said of Mr. D’Agata. “But I’m just so happy that, you know, he’s having his moment.”

Continuing to defend his counterpart, Mr. Cannavale added, “The guy’s a storyteller! And even the story of their relationship, it’s all story upon story upon story. And somewhere in there, it’s all true.”

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