‘There’s always a fresh fury’: Tracey Scott Wilson on Black America and her play about a fraudulent journalist

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. “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.” A few years later, when she was working at the University of Minnesota at a student magazine, she returned to the story. “We had access to [the digital newspaper 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’.” Her play’s protagonist, Yvonne, is quite the character too, a Bl…