John D'Agata couldn’t help but chuckle the first time he heard that “The Lifespan of a Fact,” a book he co-authored in 2012, could be a play.

The book chronicles tense conversations between D'Agata and co-author Jim Fingal as the latter fact checks the former’s 2003 essay on a teenage suicide in Las Vegas. It yanks readers between essay and conversation as Fingal pushes for sourcing and precision, with D’Agata defending that his work belongs in an artistic space between fact and fiction.

Questioning a need for accuracy? Introducing ambiguity in nonfiction? The book didn’t touch a nerve in literary and journalistic circles — it smashed it with a hammer.

So D’Agata, director of nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa, wasn’t thinking too much of it when a “very, very nice” older man pulled him aside at a book signing in New York City. Just another angry reader, right?

“I thought someone was going to scream at me the way people have been screaming at me for months,” said D’Agata, a Cape Cod native teaching in Iowa City since 2005. “He said, ‘This could be a play.’ ... I dismissed it because that’s a strange idea.”

D’Agata’s agent called him the next day to say he had a conversation with the same man, film and theater producer Norman Twain, who wanted to buy the book’s stage rights. A contract was signed three months later and “The Lifespan of a Fact,” starring Daniel Radcliffe, Bobby Cannavale and Cherry Jones debuts this week at Studio 54 in New York City.

Twain died of bladder cancer in 2016, D’Agata said, leaving “Bridges of Madison County” and “Fiddler on the Roof” revival producer Jeffrey Richards to finish leading the book to the Broadway stage.

Radcliffe, of “Harry Potter” fame, plays a zealous fact-checker in the one-act comedy, with Cannavale playing the author, or “the character John” as D’Agata calls his stage portrayal.

The production is self-described as “the ultimate showdown between truth and fiction” with Radcliffe and Cannavale’s characters. Cherry Jones, playing the role of magazine editor, has the final whether the work publishes.

“I am basically sent in and I make (D'Agata's) life hell for a couple of days by pulling out all of these threads of his article until the whole thing begins to unravel,” Radcliffe told BroadwayWorld.

The Iowa author stayed mostly hands-off during the adaptation, but he attended a table reading with Radcliffe where he said “the room just didn’t stop laughing.”

“It was hilarious and it was tender,” he said. “(Each character) made really good points in the course of this argument and every character in this argument made really ridiculous points. No one really ended up looking the heroine. ...They looked like people with opinions having a discussion.”

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And Cannavale — the “Boardwalk Empire” and “Third Watch” actor who’s mastered Hollywood’s no-nonsense tough guy role — playing D’Agata? That made him a little anxious.

“I may have mentioned to a student (my) excitement about Bobby, but also (mentioned) a little nervousness about some of the evilness of some of his characters,” D’Agata said. “And the student said, ‘Yes, but he plays evil with heart and that’s what makes him interesting.’ I wasn't nervous after that.”

Cannavale explained to BroadwayWorld that his version of D’Agata comes with “so much leeway, thematically speaking.”

“I'm playing him by name, but I'm playing my version of him and that is something he is very happy about,” Cannavale said. “He is not expecting me to dress like him or talk like him or any of that.

“We are doing our version of their truth.”

As for the play version of D’Agata and Fingal’s disagreements, the author hopes it exists — as the book does — in the space between fact and fiction.

“It’s not 100 percent nonfiction, but neither is it fiction and that’s exactly the point,” D’Agata said. “Because that’s where art exists, at least for me. Those areas of our mind where we don’t have all the answers.”

“The Lifespan of a Fact” anticipates to run for 16 weeks at Studio 54. Find more information at lifespanofafact.com.