What would you ask of your lover if you were suddenly given just three weeks to live?
Linda wants her husband to read her private journals after she is gone. But first she, in return, would like to read his.
Steven Dietz’s “Fiction” asks whether it’s better to live blissfully unaware of a hurtful lie than to die fully apprised of a hurtful truth. His argument for full matrimonial disclosure is as brutally honest as it is heroically romantic: “A secret, like a disease, is a human thing. It hides inside you, discovers where you are most vulnerable – and then it hurts you.”
So says Linda, the dying young wife in this smart and mature relationship drama that’s compelling from its first line and surprising until its last. In its expert regional premiere by the Curious Theatre Company, director Jamie Horton and three of Denver’s very best actors manage to turn a contrived crisis into a melancholy examination of the speciousness of memory, and that part of ourselves even couples can’t share.
Dietz can flat-out write, and “Fiction” is loaded with comic zingers and poignant observations that couples will quote for years. An example: “Anyone who says ‘never mind,’ is right on the precipice of saying what’s really on their minds.”
Michael and Linda are writers, which justifies their ceaseless, Cowardesque wit. Linda (Martha Harmon Pardee) is an acclaimed author of a novel based on her being raped in South Africa. Michael (John Hutton) is an accidental best seller – “a hack,” he admits.
“Fiction” unfolds like a mystery. We open in a Paris café, the couple’s first meeting. It’s a passionate if mundane debate over whether “Twist & Shout” was John Lennon’s best vocal work. And their banter is almost too witty to be true. Because it’s not. We are watching how the encounter was later committed to Michael’s diary.
This notion of subjective experience plays big in this play. We all do it. We embellish – on paper or on a barstool. On retelling, we make our repartee more witty, our rejoinder more clever. We fantasize, we lie and at times, we might tell something akin to the truth. Why? “Of man and his memory,” Michael says, “memory is the better writer.” Notice he said nothing of “truth.”
Back in the present, Linda dives into Michael’s journals, focusing on his month-long stay at a South African writer’s retreat years before. Here he became infatuated with mysterious, aloof stranger Anna (Karen Slack), who becomes his muse.
That Michael and Anna had a brief affair is not in question. But by intermission, we can’t take anything we have seen as undeniable truth. The affair isn’t what threatens this couple in Linda’s final days. It is the surprising nature and lifespan of the relationship that constitutes a far greater betrayal. And yet, a psychiatrist might even call Michael’s dalliances healthy. How? That’s just part of the tantalizing genius of “Fiction.”
Unfortunately a few late complicating layers put the play just a bit out of reach again. I left scratching my head over what made Anna the Beatrice to Michael’s Dante. I mean she’s a cold, humorless fish, the antithesis of a muse. Then the epiphany: Anna isn’t really the muse, she’s a fiction – a muse for the muse. So how better to establish that discrepancy between fact and fiction than to make the real Anna seem unremarkable? The weakness then becomes a strength.
Charlie Packard’s intriguing set is mostly made up of enormous white cloth strips hanging from the ceiling and strewn in waves across the floor, like two oceans meeting. The rolling staging area in between indicates that these characters are on the only piece of dry, though perilous land. To fall is to fall overboard.
I left the theater feeling duly impressed by Dietz’s construction and literate dialogue, and downright in awe of these stupendous actors. But why wasn’t I feeling more emotionally overpowered? I wondered whether, with all of the twists, turns and machinations, whether in the end, we had just been served up a fiction disguised as a truth.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Fiction” | *** 1/2 RATING
DRAMA|Curious Theatre Company|Directed by Jamie Horton|Starring John Hutton, Martha Harmon Pardee and Karen Slack|1080 Acoma St.|THROUGH JUNE 24|8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays|2 hours|$20-$30 (2-for-1 Thursdays)|303-623-0524 or curioustheatre.org
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-John Moore
