"It's a grand touch of surrealism in a play that makes theater out of one of the most quotidian sources imaginable: an hour of C-SPAN footage from 1993. The script is drawn word for word and um for um from that broadcast, in which Kramer and Dr. Anthony Fauci, then one of the country's leading AIDS researchers, debated the impediments to finding effective treatments for what Kramer furiously deemed a "plague.""
"The chicken suit is not a feature of the original broadcast. Neither is the machine that, partway through the play, noisily turns the stage into a great berg of foam, which slowly subsumes a resigned Kramer. In a work that is otherwise remarkably true to fact, those two audacious intrusions ask the audience to contrast the earnest engagement between Kramer and Fauci with the cheap carnival rules to which some viewers in this cynical age may expect them to adhere."
Kramer/Fauci stages a verbatim hour of 1993 C-SPAN footage in which Larry Kramer and Dr. Anthony Fauci clashed over obstacles to developing effective AIDS treatments. The script reproduces the broadcast word for word, including verbal tics, and then overlays theatrical inventions—a C-SPAN caller in a yellow inflatable chicken suit and a foam machine that engulfs Kramer—to create surreal contrast. Those intrusions force viewers to compare earnest, substantive debate with the gaudy, winner-loser spectacle that contemporary American politics often resembles. The piece locates that exchange within a broader American tradition of debate as performance, invoking historic Lincoln-Douglas contests and theatrical works about civic contest.
Read at The Atlantic
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