Tracey Scott Wilson's play The Story, inspired by the real-life scandal of a Black American reporter who fabricated a Pulitzer-winning article, opens at the National Theatre in London. The play, which premiered at the Public Theater in New York in 2003, examines themes of truth, media objectivity, race, and ambition. Wilson, who spoke to the Guardian, said the play's relevance has only grown as debates over fake news and media bias intensify.
A Scandal That Inspired a Play
In 1981, Janet Cooke, a young Black American reporter at The Washington Post, won the Pulitzer Prize for a story about an eight-year-old drug addict. The story was later revealed to be entirely invented, and Cooke was forced to return the prize just two days after receiving it. She was also discredited for embellishing her CV. Wilson, a teenager at the time, remembers a conversation with her father about the scandal. "He said 'It's such a shame she won it for writing something so negative [about the Black community].' And then when they said the story was a lie, it was a whole other thing," Wilson recalled.
From Newsroom to Stage
Years later, while working at a student magazine at the University of Minnesota, Wilson revisited Cooke's story using the digital archive LexisNexis. "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,'" she said. The play's protagonist, Yvonne, is a Black American junior reporter with an Ivy League education and a Sorbonne background, assigned to a section that puts a positive spin on race coverage. Her ambition drives her to seek a story that will fast-track her to the national news desk.
Relevance in the Age of Fake News
The play's original run coincided with the Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times, where a Black reporter admitted to inventing and plagiarising stories. Wilson noted that both cases involved race and class, exploring who is deemed inside or outside the Black community. "I was drawn to the idea of authenticity," she said, "which is a conversation we are having every single day around class, race, sexuality, and who is allowed to be the spokesperson." The play also delves into women and ambition, with Wilson adding that she wanted to bring Pat, a senior editor and Black woman, into the conversation. "Pat and Yvonne are two sides of the same coin," she explained.
A London Revival Decades in the Making
The London production had a false start in the early 2000s when the Soho Theatre invited Wilson for a reading. "I had never been overseas, I had to go and get a passport," she said. The reading wasn't picked up, but Wilson didn't forget it. It was only when the National Theatre called last year that she realised the trip hadn't been wasted. Clint Dyer, the director, had been at the Soho reading as a young actor and had championed the play ever since. "I had a Zoom with [the NT] and Clint was there. I didn't remember him but he said he had loved [the reading in 2003] and every single time he went to do a play in a theatre he would say 'Have you read The Story?'" Wilson recounted.
Media Objectivity and Consumption
Wilson, who once wanted to be a journalist, was told by a Rutgers University professor that she editorialised too much and couldn't be objective. She switched to English, but noted that the media landscape has changed. "There's always been rags," she said, "but I think what's happening now is that there is resignation and acceptance that this is what it is, as opposed to 'I know that that's a rag, but this is a paper of note that tries to tell an objective truth.'" She also reflected on how news consumption has become personalised, comparing it to avoiding sports results after a loss. "It's become a case of reading the news that fits your perspective so you don't have to feel bad about reality," she said.
Wilson acknowledged that the scandal at the heart of the play would resonate differently today, with news cycles moving faster. "Everything that happens would now happen in a week and we'd forget about it, or it would live on in a particular niche on the internet. The fury only lasts 20 minutes now because there's another fresh fury," she said. Despite this, she stopped short of a blanket condemnation of the media. "You can criticise the big mainstream papers, but you also have these people on the internet who are saying 'This is the news from Gaza'. There are people committed to trying to tell the truth," she said. The Story runs at the National Theatre until 24 October.
