Something interesting is happening with the slash in the middle of the title of Daniel Fish’s extraordinary “Kramer/Fauci.”
It’s a busy little punctuation mark. For one thing, it suggests that Fish, a Tony-nominated director best known for his experimental staging of “Oklahoma!,” is basing his work in fact. Often used as a no-fuss archival notation or in a poster for a heavyweight bout, a “/” can gesture both to truth and to opposition. (You might think of Peter Morgan’s 2006 historical drama, “Frost/Nixon,” or the more recent docudrama “The Ford/Hill Project.”)
On Nov. 30, 1993, C-SPAN hosted a call-in program, including Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Larry Kramer, the hot-tempered playwright and activist, sparring over a new government task force on H.I.V. and AIDS. In Fish’s production, the dialogue spoken by Fauci (Will Brill), Kramer (Thomas Jay Ryan), the various callers (Jennifer Seastone) and the interviewer Steve Scully (Greig Sargeant) is verbatim, replicating that same C-SPAN recording, which they hear through in-ear speakers.
Experiencing Fish’s discombobulating, sometimes absurd production is utterly unlike watching the original television interview, however. We don’t see Fauci sitting in a Washington, D.C., studio, nor Kramer appearing via video screen — instead, the actors roam the St. Ann’s Warehouse vastness, aimless as animals in a field. Lights shine in our eyes. Seastone, deadpan, gives all the callers a dreamy quality, sometimes gliding around on roller skates or climbing inside an immense inflatable chicken suit.
The performers don’t imitate their counterparts so much as channel them. Kramer’s fire seems banked in the cool-eyed Ryan … until he yells. And Brill sports the un-Fauci-esque mustache of a 1970s bank robber, but he captures the tidy scientist’s essence anyway — unflappable patience, Brooklyn accent and all. (“I love ya, Larry!”)
About halfway through, seemingly at random, Ryan drags a foam machine onto the stage. It whirs into action, filling the room’s center with piles and piles of soapy bubbles. We almost lose sight of Kramer, as he sits amid this glittering cumulus. Ryan, a performer of wit and gravitas, wanders through the foam-field, cutting pathways into it; then he squeegees up the mess.
The conversation is, on its surface, combative. Kramer attacks the Clinton administration for a lack of urgency in drug research; he’s furious about Fauci’s insistence that the government is moving as quickly as it can. “Tony, if you start that business about science isn’t done that way, I’m going to come on down there and slap your face!” Kramer says.
But the two men — clearly old friends — are also in profound accord. They have both dedicated themselves to fighting the same disease: an “epidemic,” says Fauci; “A PLAGUE!” shouts Kramer. The provocateur and the conciliator need each other to keep the course. At one point a caller asks about forcibly isolating AIDS patients. “Yeah, Larry, I’ll get you off the hook,” Fauci says, before calmly dismissing the morally foul idea.
Because Fish’s “/” has a second meaning: equivalence. Kramer burns with the zeal of a man under live fire; Fauci talks to (and sometimes like) the Washington politicians. Yet they are platonically connected, components of one whole effort.
What unites them — what that slash contains, leaning like a gravestone — is grief. Neither of them wants a single other person to die of the disease, yet they know many deaths are to come. Kramer received an H.I.V. diagnosis in 1988; in 1993, he had no way of knowing that he would not die until 2020. One caller talks about a sister who has died of AIDS. Ryan’s Kramer looks down into Seastone’s face. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. It’s unbearably sad, and they bear it and bear it.
“Kramer/Fauci” is the most beautiful show I’ve seen this year. I saw a staging at NYU Skirball, in February, and I would happily see it 10 times more.
It is piercingly relevant, and not just because Fauci, more than 30 years later, has been asked by Congress to defend his work in another plague. (“He is a man, an ordinary man who was being asked to play God, and he is being punished because he cannot be God,” says Kramer, at one point.) But the play also contains some emotional mystery that I can’t figure out. How is it so heartbreaking and so hopeful? These are all actors of deep soulfulness. Perhaps that’s why their not-quite portrayals have struck me so hard and burrowed so deep.
Or it could simply be that I’m still wondering about the foam. Fish knows that a surreal image will prompt metaphorical thinking. Perhaps it will make you think about so-called foamy viruses. Perhaps we’re meant to meditate on the sexual license of foam parties. At one point, I saw Kramer and Fauci as Olympian figures, striding around heaven. Or maybe we are simply witnessing the creation of a million delicate, almost-living structures. Here they are for a moment, in a place we know they cannot stay.
Kramer/Fauci Through Oct. 24 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 1 hour.
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