Eric Simonson is clearly into mousetraps. His play Honest, which had a run this summer as part of Steppenwolf Theatre’s First Look Repertory of New Work, gives us Gus, a smooth operator who’s written a best-selling memoir of his harrowing—and entirely fabricated—experience with addiction, homelessness, and the radical environmentalist underground. When a reporter arrives to confront him about inconsistencies in the book, Gus plays the poor guy so mercilessly that he ends up handing over his integrity to advance Gus’s fraud, and getting bubkes in return.
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Fake revolves around the real-life Piltdown Man hoax, next to which Gus’s memoir is a laughably crude little fib. In 1912, an amateur English paleontologist named Charles Dawson allegedly found ancient bone fragments at a gravel pit in Sussex. Reassembled by Arthur Woodward of London’s Natural History Museum, they yielded a skull that was touted as belonging to the Missing Link—the hypothetical creature that was supposed to fill in the evolutionary blank spot between apes and modern man. There was plenty of controversy over the authenticity of the find, but nobody could authoritatively debunk it until 1953, when J.S. Weiner, Kenneth Oakley, and others subjected the fragments to the advanced tests of the day. As it turned out, Piltdown Man had the cranium of a medieval-vintage human, the filed-down teeth of a chimp, and the jaw of an orangutan.
Act two jumps to 1953. Doug Arnt and Jonathan Cole (basically Weiner and Oakley, but with juicier sex lives than the historical record supplies) are busy testing the famous skull but still have time for a romantic triangle involving Katarina, Cole’s Lithuanian fiancee—a former student who admits to having run a little game on Cole to win what might more accurately be called his affectionate attention than his love. In the Kat competition, Arnt has youth, charm, and apparent sincerity on his side—Cole calls him a “sunshine boy from sunny LA”—but the world-weary Cole operates on another level of sophistication entirely. His mousetrap is the subtlest and its object the most surprising of all.
