A young boy has jumped from a Las Vegas Hotel observation deck to his death. Emily, editor of a struggling quality magazine, gives recent Harvard grad Jim his first assignment. He’s to fact check the suicide story by top-flight author John. His by-line, Emily hopes, will attract more readers and advertisers. Jim dives into his job, notices scores of fishy details, and visits John to point out his factual deviations from truth. John always insists he’s written not an article (most often factual journalism) but an essay (that usually allows personal interpretations). Jim so much challenges the “truth” John presents as facts that Emily comes to Vegas to confront him and examine Jim’s findings. Will she stick with John’s original script, admit changes, or decide not to publish it at all?
Funny exchanges come fast, furiously—and entertainingly—between Derek Speedy’s smart yet nerdy Jim and Gene Wegandt’s understandably self-satisfied John, who gets just short of outraged about how a human interest story is best conveyed. Tracy Michelle Arnold rises above Emily’s desire to have business proceed as usual. She makes the long trip from NYC to pursue truth and take the right action for herself and her magazine. What it will be is a mystery. Andrew F. Griffin’s lighting works well as Brian Prather’s set moves from Emily’s spare office in a skyscraper in an icy NYC to John’s house off in a corner of a desert shown in an upper projection. It places a Vegas crowded with skyscrapers at a distant opposite corner. Except for John’s simple living room, his home is strangely arranged and messy. Sound by Emily Auciello punctuates humorous movements. Jen Caprio costumes the actors to reflect different degrees of formality that changes with how they proceed to deal with the dramatic problem. Celine Rosenthal’s direction slickly handles movement in plot and character. Her emphasis on the comedy in the play seems geared to making the serious pursuit of truth more palatable to an audience. What the play does not do is persuade that either John or Jim’s version of the relation of facts to truth is, in fact, true. This opens an audience to further thinking and perhaps argument about that.
