If our ability to discern fake news from fact is a hot topic today, Tracey Scott Wilson was on to it more than two decades ago. As a child, the playwright’s father trained her to watch the news every night and discuss it with her three siblings. It meant that she was well placed in the early 00s to spot how stations such as Fox News were veering away from objective reporting to become angled towards a given agenda.
By this point a real-life story had been percolating in Wilson’s mind for more than two decades: in 1981, Janet Cooke, a young, ambitious Black American reporter at The Washington Post, had been exposed as a liar. Cooke had just won the Pulitzer prize for her news story about an eight-year-old drug addict, which turned out to be invented. Cooke was discredited, both for her reporting and for embellishing her CV, and was forced to hand back her prize two days after receiving it.
That scandal became the engine for The Story, Wilson’s breakthrough play at the Public Theater in New York in 2003, now being staged at the National Theatre in London Wilson, a rangy, affable presence, is delighted by her play’s revival at a time when the notion of truth, and the media’s part in producing it, couldn’t be more contested. She was a teenager when the Cooke story emerged and a conversation with her father has stayed with her. I was bored half the time in that job so I’d just look up stories and one day I thought ‘I wonder what happened to Janet Cooke.’ So I put it in LexisNexis and went down a rabbit hole.
I thought ‘what a great character she is’.” Her play’s protagonist, Yvonne, is quite the character too, a Black American junior reporter with a CV that takes in an Ivy League education by way of the Sorbonne. She is assigned to a section whose raison d’etre is to put a positive spin on the newspaper’s race coverage – happy stories featuring the local Black American community to offset the negative ones. It is too niche to hold Yvonne’s ambition so she begins her hunt for a story that will fast-track her to the national news desk, populated by, one imagines, white, male, big beasts.
Serendipitously, the play’s original run coincided with the breaking of another newspaper scandal involving Jayson Blair, a Black reporter who admitted to inventing and plagiarising stories while working for the New York Times. That story had race and class elements, just like Wilson’s play: Yvonne is a middle-class woman who sparks resentment and friction because of her (apparent) privilege. Through her, Wilson examines notions of who is deemed inside/outside the fold of the Black community.
Pat and Yvonne are two sides of the same coin, they are both women who are being constantly punished for their ambition and being forced to do things because of their ambition.” There was a false start for a London revival soon after its original staging in New York, when the Soho theatre, in London, invited Wilson to the UK for a reading. They put me up here for a week. I barely remember the reading because I was going to Westminster Abbey, and doing all the tourist things.” It wasn’t picked up and Wilson went back home.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
