Fiction

Fiction is about married authors who read each others’ diaries and notebooks and discover secret lives.Both Linda, and Michael, are published writers as well as prolific journal keepers. It is their journals which serve as playwright Dietz’s Pandora’s box. Since their first meeting at a Paris cafe, Linda and Michael have thrived on rapid fire, frequently quotable and argumentative repartee. When they are not playing verbal ping pong, they address the audience with incisive and equally quotable monologues. Linda, upon being diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor and facing death within three weeks (as she figures it – ” twenty meals …”) asks Michael to read her private journals after her death. She explains, “It’s ludicrous not to mention vain; I mean vain in a truly Tom Wolfe-ian sort of way, that I am not real unless someone reads my journals." She adds a request that has the effect of a ticking bomb: Before she goes, she wants to read his journals. A third character – Abby, – appears in both journals but in very different ways."The lies begin when you lift the pen," is a line that comes up early on in the play. Playwright Stephen Dietz has written a jigsaw puzzle that’s a quotable feast. Fiction is a witty, literate examination of the secrets we keep from even those we trust the most. "Mark Twain said, ‘Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story,’ yet how often are we also guilty of stretching the truth a little to stir a little more interest or humor out of a tale?" said Knezz. "When does this innocent merry-making become controversial, debatable, or dangerous and at what point does our ‘stretching’change the truth into fiction?”