Perhaps a subtitle for Fiction should be "Or Fact?" Like playwright Steven Dietz, characters Linda and Michael Waterman are authors who keep us wondering what's true. Having met in a Paris cafe where their stimulating conversation (at least as remembered by Michael) led to a marriage of 20 years, both have successful careers. After early "dry" attempts at creating literature and a month at Drake Writers Colony, he became a best-selling novelist with annual movie adaptations. A dynamic teacher of creative writing (lessons she demonstrates to us in due course), Linda's foremost credential is "After the Cape," an acclaimed literary achievement. Believed to be largely autobiographical, it's a tale of Apartheid-related rape and murder in South Africa.
Now Linda has a brain tumor that places her three weeks or, as she quips, "only 20 meals" from passing away. She's leaving Michael the part of herself he's never known: her journals, to be read when she's gone. "I'm not real unless someone reads them," she says. But she's got another factual death wish -- to isolate herself and, so she'll truly know him, read his diaries in the time she has left. There she learns of his writers colony experience with Abby Drake, seemingly casual goader of colony residents but actually a literary savant. (So many allusions in her conversation!) Not only was she a Beatrice to Michael's Dante, but -- what wounds Linda deeply -- their relationship extended throughout the Watermans' years together. That is -- if it existed in reality or through the "filter" of Michael's diaries. (Isn't that rendezvous with Abby in the same cafe of Michael and Linda's meeting a bit much to believe?) "Memory," as Michael tells us, is "a better writer than a man." There are still more secrets and memories he and Linda share with us and perhaps never should have shared with each other. She compares them to a disease hiding inside, discovered "when you are most vulnerable -- and then it hurts you."
Now come more twists. One is an abrupt change in Linda's disease. Another comes with an appearance by Abby. Finally, we hear of Linda's experience, before Michael's, at the Drake Writers Colony. But how much is fiction, how much fact? And what are we to believe? Well, not least importantly, that Steven Dietz confronts us with an intriguing dramatic dilemma written in a witty, dynamic style and imaginatively structured. Cagily, director Martin LaPlatney doesn't give anything away. We feel suspense at every turn, challenged but not cheated. The almost bare stage never distracts us from listening to the language. Lighting reflects the characters' moods and situations -- dim, for instance, when Michael is stuck with calm, trying to write. Then John Wojda slumps properly, whereas when forced to go where he doesn't want to go, he gropes the air, as if balancing. Susan Greenhill's Linda almost nags him, so powerfully insistent is her air and (sometimes too-fast) gravelly speech.
Although it takes a bit of conjuring to imagine jeans-clad Abby as a Beatrice, Amy Lynn Stewart endows her with believable smarts. All three actors handle the demanding dialogue with ease.
Florida Studio Theater deserves credit for introducing Sarasota to author Dietz and in such a credible production.We may well wish, after this, for more of his plays to be performed here.
