The Observer's Julie York Coppens calls the production "provocative" and "rewarding", noting that "actors Joe Copley and Sheila Snow Proctor navigate...emotionally tricky scenes with great delicacy." Creative Loafing's Perry Tannenbaum says, "the give-and-take between books and real life gets fairly constant play as we explore the suspenseful love triangle at the core of Steven Dietz's cleverly crafted drama."

Read the full Creative Loafing review:

Dire Diaries

Perry Tannenbaum 

Maybe if I'd sat further back at Duke Power Theatre, I would have noticed sooner that Collaborative Arts' entire production of Fiction is performed by three actors on a way-oversized stack of three books. Not to worry. The give-and-take between books and real life gets fairly constant play as we explore the suspenseful love triangle at the core of Steven Dietz's cleverly crafted drama.

We see the husband and wife in this triangle, Michael and Linda Waterman, from their first chance meeting at a Paris café. Eventually, we get replays of this scene in their concise diary accounts. These passages reveal an instant magnetism between the two. Other passages, which they'll read many years later, contain the seeds of their undoing. Or, more precisely, their mutual recognition.

Michael and Linda are both novelists, you see. So while their diaries loom ever-large (open pages with inky scribble serve as floor and backdrop for the top level of Andrew Gibbons' set design), Fiction is also about the books that the Watermans write -- and those they don't.

Abby Drake, the administrator of a writer's colony, completes the love triangle. Played by Elise Wilkinson with a coolness that never quite discourages pursuit, Abby seems somewhat secondary at first. But her significance mushrooms after intermission when we learn how she has impacted the artistic output of both Watermans.

From certain angles, Fiction turns out to be Abby's story. One of the Watermans takes advantage of her, and she exacts her vengeance through the other. When we tally up the evening's intimacies and altercations, Abby's scorecard is also balanced in terms of helping the Watermans achieve their artistic potentials during their sojourns at the Drake Colony.

The Watermans do prevail when we reckon in the wit that Dietz has lavished upon them. Although she gives Linda more energy than we see from Abby, Sheila Snow Proctor doesn't tip the balance, aware that Linda has more than one malignity in her brain. Nor does she overdo Linda's spontaneous brilliance as a university lecturer, knowing perhaps than Dietz has made her too good to be true.

Michael's urbanity fits Joe Copley like a glove, but director James Yost draws more energy, urgency and vulnerability than we usually see from him, all of it effective. The through-line of Michael's character is his penchant for palming off truly great writers' wit as his own. Copley delivers the witticisms with just the right nonchalance -- and suffers being caught in his thieveries with a suave, world-weary sigh that is equally apt.

Dietz is having his fun with us both dramatically and intellectually. To prevent leaving us with a bad aftertaste, he allows himself extra portions of the trite and derivative qualities he ascribes to his protagonists. Are Linda's lecture segments stolen lovingly from The Heidi Chronicles? Likely. Has a fictional fiction writer pursuing female quarry been brought up short passing off others' brilliance as his own? Many, many times before this.

The difference here is that Dietz is not a hack. His insights into the psyche of writers, both real and intentionally bogus, are worth your consideration.

Read the full Charlotte Observer review:

Open diaries reveal lies of love

Married authors share journals in provocative play at Spirit Square

JULIE YORK COPPENS

"The lies begin when we lift the pen."

Linda, one of two author characters in Steven Dietz's provocative drama "Fiction," remembers hearing this bit of bitter wisdom from an old writing teacher.

Notice the phrasing: when we lift the pen. Not "when the pen touches the paper." In other words, the very decision to write implies a kind of deception. The lie poisons our heads before our hands get to work.

And this is true, "Fiction" argues, even when we think we're writing only for ourselves.

Collaborative Arts' flawed but rewarding production at Spirit Square portrays a marriage both parties assumed was an open book. (In Andrew Gibbons' smart set design, the play actually unfolds against the giant, hand-scribbled leaves of three stacked volumes. The show's other visuals, like the costumes that ignore the passage of time, are less carefully considered.)

We see Linda and Michael's first meeting -- which quickly becomes their first good-humored argument -- in a Parisian café. We watch them mature into professionals on opposite ends of the literary spectrum: She writes one critically acclaimed novel, he churns out a series of pulpy bestsellers. We see them cope with the news that Linda, stricken with a brain tumor, has three weeks to live.

That's when they decide to read each others' diaries.

Actors Joe Copley and Sheila Snow Proctor navigate this and other emotionally tricky scenes with great delicacy. There might be novels in women's glances, as the unoriginally witty Michael observes, but there's at least a whole chapter in Copley's panicked pause as the wife asks her husband to hand his journals over.

Later, gradually -- too gradually, in Dietz's leisurely script and in this slow-paced performance -- we discover the reason for Michael's reluctance. A third character shows up, a writers' colony administrator named Abby (Elise Wilkinson in a low-energy but edgy portrayal), who holds pages in the couples' history that both would rather keep secret.

Sharp viewers will anticipate the final chapter of "Fiction" long before Dietz delivers his last plot twist. Even so, it's satisfying -- if also troubling, for anyone married in real life -- to watch this seemingly happy relationship slowly unravel. At times, the destructive tugs come suddenly, and Proctor in particular pulls those feelings out with courageous force.

"I need some lies!" Proctor cries in one early exchange, as Linda reaches for hope of some wacky miracle cure for her malignancy. It's a moving expression of loss, or anticipated loss, from a woman we believe to be uncompromisingly honest.

But as we turn through the pages of "Fiction," we learn that lies -- hers, Dietz's, maybe even our own -- are everywhere.