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'Fiction' is difficult to believe

By JOHN FLEMING
Published July 20, 2006

SARASOTA - Journal and diary keepers will find a cautionary tale in Fiction, Steven Dietz's play about the marriage of two writers, at Florida Studio Theatre. When Linda Waterman learns she has a brain tumor and three weeks to live, she bequeaths to her husband, Michael, the journals she has kept, to be read after her death.

"And one thing more," Linda tells him. She wants to read Michael's journals before she is gone.

Of course, most journals are interesting only to the people who keep them, but Linda (played by Susan Greenhill) and Michael (John Wojda) being writers, their innermost thoughts are presumably fascinating. The reputation of Samuel Pepys, the 17th century English diarist who set the standard for this offhand art form, is in no danger of being supplanted by Dietz's characters, whose entries are absurdly overwritten, not to mention their dialogue.

Fiction flashes back and forth in time. It opens in a Paris bistro, where Linda and Michael met and began their relationship with a heated debate over the greatest rock 'n' roll performance. Her choice is Janis Joplin's Piece of My Heart, his is John Lennon's Twist and Shout, and those baby boom icons pretty much sum up the sensibility of the play.

Naturally when Linda curls up with a cup of tea and Michael's journals - stored in a (Pandora's) box - she comes across an incriminating episode. It involves a young muse, Abby Drake, whom Michael met at a writers' colony. Linda also knows Abby (Amy Lynn Stewart), having spent time at the colony where she wrote her acclaimed South African memoir, At the Cape. Linda now teaches creative writing, and Michael has become a famous, and self-proclaimed "hack," novelist whose books are turned into blockbuster movies.

Everything is apparently not what it seems in the journals. As Michael puts it, "The lies begin when we lift the pen." As could also be said, in the case of Dietz's script, about clever plot twists. There's something laborious about the appearance-vs.-reality jigsaw puzzle the playwright constructed for his threesome. Their relationship never rings true in a dramatic sense, and the wisecracks are too labored for Fiction to work as a satire of the writing life.

This production, directed by Martin LaPlatney, doesn't overcome the play's shortcomings.

On opening night, the timing between Greenhill and Wojda seemed off, with occasional line bobbles, especially in his annoyingly affected delivery of Michael's rococo flights of self-importance. Their supposedly witty badinage, mainly predictable one-liners on the literary trade ("Writers don't want to write, they just want to have written"), was exhausting. Stewart seemed too ordinary to inspire a novelist and came across as little more than a plot device.

Scenic designer Marcella Beckwith provided the plainest of sets, with just a table and chairs, matching green coffee cups and a desk. What little atmosphere existed was conjured up by Martin E. Vreeland's lighting. Costumer Nicole Wee gave Linda a cozy shawl for her convalescence.

[Last modified July 20, 2006, 01:50:55]