Museum Day / "The Lifespan of a Fact" by the Elsinore Theatre Company

On Wednesdays, my fiancé and I go on adventures. His day off, we try to take advantage as much as we can. I told him on the 154 campus-bound bus that I had to write something, I was dying to, before The Lifespan of a Fact closes at the Athenaeum Theatre. So I look up into the famed mouth of Sue as my partner steps away to take a call, and the fossil illustrates that facts have lived well beyond this particular lifespan. 

Back – have they? Sue is inferentially assigned a sex. Displayed with a puffed-up, perfected, fake skull that is not their own.  Brown, not red. Misinformed. This all on the surface, in the writing, on the first page of the essay.

The Stage Manager usually paces in the lobby before curtain, and the pre-show soundtrack has become a tee-up countdown to when I need to close the doors as the House Manager. When I do, I sneak to the tech door where my entrance will not be an interruption. Don’t look at the picture, we learn quickly. Ask questions, fine, but in a timely manner, and not the wrong ones. A play like learning to edit and learning to write, we are like Jim (Thomas Neumann); headstrong. Assumptive. Obsessive. In the duration of Elsinore Theatre’s The Lifespan of a Fact, we are told that to write is to be wrong, to publish is to be right, to second-guess is to persevere.

Levi Presley does not appear, but is centric to the scriptural concept. A review of a su*cide, you should know, emerges as the inciting incident, presented by John D’Agata (Jamie Ewing). A question of rather such a review should be an autopsic report. An insistence that whatever it is, it needs to sell and it needs to fly on a deadline.

The Lifespan of a Fact prepositions to be returned to. Though some performances I merely listen to from a comfortable perch in the lobby, following along with a wristwatch and a memory of standout punchlines, I do unwittingly. I do in the annoying repetition of recommendation to friends of performing arts to attend the play before it closes, I do in tiffs with my partner over exact quotes in the script. One of the volunteer ushers even said she would, in an unexpectedly intimate way, as she revealed that she was scheduled to visit the Stratosphere Hotel the day after she attended. Coincidentally reserving a stay at the same hotel where this play fixated – undoubtedly she returned to this story at the very least in the next day, and the next. I picture her telling her son about it on the plane to Vegas, and to the conciergerie front desk, and maybe after a cosmopolitan to the person next to her at the slot machines. How weird is that, she would say. It was funny, she might say. In a dark way, she would tell them. She would know just what to say.

Is it such a human need to crave a sequel, to know more? I revile the gratuitous nature of Hollywoodsian pre- and sequels building empires of dust upon a rare nuggette of gold, but – Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell, associated playwrights, are not in my electronic rolodex, and yet I wish to ask for a continuation to Emily Penrose (Lori Rohr). Like with Sue, we infer. We see her insecurity and defensive persuasion, we see what unknowns she accepts like a vitamin, and which she avoids like an infection. If I have been taught to question, I reject that an inference is a fact. There is no lifespan of facts on Emily Penrose, yet I know for every character I write, there is a long list of unnecessary facts in smudged handwriting. A birthday, a favorite flavor profile, if they prefer to take a phone call or an e-mail. Exists somewhere is an answer of the editor’s story, buried in a notebook, buried in a stack of notebooks. Could John D’Agata not have written about that?

Pink walls and projections that tell time. Text bubbles that don’t feel like they were written by a fifty-year-old. And a three-person cast to clear the coffee table and put all the pieces together, fact by fact.

Elsinore Theatre’s production of The Lifespan of a Fact will close on May the 4th, on the third floor black box space in the Athenaeum Theatre.