Is That A Fact? Just Ask TheaterWorks Hartford's Tasha Lawrence
In the Broadway play Lifespan of a Fact, which starred Daniel Radcliffe, Bobby Cannavale and Cherry Jones, a proofreader, editor and writer battle over what is true and what are a writer’s embellishments to make a story more human. In the TheaterWorks production, which opens Feb. 6 after a week of previews and plays through March 8 in Hartford, Tasha Lawrence plays the part of the editor faced with a few cruel facts of her own, namely the diminishment of journalistic staffs.
I ask Lawrence to tell me two interesting true things about herself — and one false one. “Oh, that sounds like fun. Let me see. One, I am a professional auctioneer. Two, I rode horses competitively, and three, I am bilingual, speaking Russian fluently.”
My first guess is wrong, based primarily on the authority with which she states that “fact.” (Lawrence is not bilingual.) I say that if you tell a falsehood with confidence, people tend to believe you. Yes, she says, but the opposite is also true.
“Have you seen the interview with Prince Andrew [about his friendship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein]? I hear that when people are remembering things that are true they look down and when they’re making things up they look up. He should have never done the interview. It was a disaster, but to watch his body language and see how uncomfortable he was, you could tell he was lying.”
What is true, false and in between is what the play is all about, she says. “In this play you want the writer’s story to be told the way it’s being told. Take out the embellishments and it just dries out the piece and the heart sort of falls out of it. There’s a human desire to want the story to have all those juicy details — that may not be true. But if you take all the details out, it sort of dehumanizes the story.”