What: Skirball Theater presents the Daniel Fish-directed verbatim play depicting a contentious televised confrontation on CSPAN between legendary (and incendiary) gay rights activist Larry Kramer (author of The Normal Heart) and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading AIDS researcher.
And? Daniel Fish is such a strange combination of being able to draw out interesting, understated performances and just throwing things at the wall and saying "fuck it." Will Brill as Fauci and Thomas Jay Ryan as Kramer are wonderful. Kramer is the juicier role in many ways, with his incendiary rants, his penchant for taking over the conversation, and his bone-deep passion for his cause; Ryan captures all of that perfectly, showing us a man whom is simultaneously impossible to hate but very possible to want to slug. As to the design, well, the preshow lighting by Scott Zielinski feels like an assault: a grid of lights on the back wall shining aggressively at the audience with no softer overhead light to balance it. Why? To annoy Zelda? Who knows. Tei Blow's sound design, however, is perfectly intimate, letting us hear the slight tinniness of voices in microphones while also feeling like those voices are speaking directly in our ears. Fish's staging is deliberately abstract, which is fine: it gives us something dynamic to look at for what would otherwise just be talking heads, if we went literal. But then there are just some weirdass choices that to me never end up connecting to the story being told: Jennifer Seastone, who plays all the call-ins during the televised sequence, begins the show watching patiently in roller blades and a neon pink windbreaker: once she starts to call in she skates her way around the space. I was fine with this, as it shows the more infantile approach by the laypeople to the arguments raised by the experts, but then later she dons an inflatable chicken costume. Sure, why not, right? Oh and there's a tower that starts gouting out giant clouds of bubbles, forming a mountainous blanket for the stage that will slowly melt over the rest of the hour-long performance, while Kramer sits calmly in a chair and lets it engulf him.
I ... listen, I like unusual staging, I like when we engage with the metaphor that is live performance, when we depart from the literal to see what additional stories we can tell with the texts we have. But I also like for those choices to contribute to story, character, or theme. These just felt like weirdness for the sake of weirdness. It's either too deep for me or too silly for me. I bet I know which one Daniel Fish thinks it is.
