If you have ever felt that the American political landscape resembles some kind of nightmarish circus, you may find catharsis in the new play Kramer/Fauci, in which the writer and AIDS activist Larry Kramer faces off with a C-SPAN caller wearing a yellow inflatable chicken suit. 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...
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