Kramer/Fauci” is billed as a verbatim re-creation of a 1993 discussion of the AIDS epidemic on C-SPAN between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Larry Kramer, but the original hour on cable didn’t feature a caller dressed as a chicken, banks of bright lights shining directly at the audience’s eyes, or a massive stage filling with soap suds. No matter. Director Daniel Fish, whose dark version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” similarly featured some distracting avant-garde touches, nevertheless provides a useful historical perspective with this production, opening tonight at St. Ann’s Warehouse.
It’s also, to some extent, a historical corrective. Some may think of Larry Kramer, screenwriter and playwright turned AIDS activist – founder of GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), and then, when he was kicked out of that, of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) – as the hard-charging adversary of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. But by 1993, more than a dozen years into the appearance of the AIDS epidemic, they called each other friends.
This doesn’t stop Kramer (Thomas Jay Ryan) from attacking Fauci (Will Brill) on the show, calling him a bureaucrat and a coward. “Tony, if you start that business about science isn’t done that way, I’m going to come on there and slap your face….When you talk like that, I hate you.”
“All right, Larry,” Fauci replies mildly, “I love you, Larry.”
But in what is the most dramatic and intriguing of his comments, Kramer also says:
“The world must think I hate Tony, the way I’m going on tonight. I love Tony, actually. I think I probably have a more complicated relationship with Tony than anybody in my entire life. He is a man, an ordinary man who was being asked to play God and he is being punished because he cannot be God. And that is a terrible situation to be in to be the lightning rod for all of us.”
Three decades later, Kramer’s words outlive him; he died in 2020, at the age of 84, at the peak of COVID-19, another public health crisis involving Dr. Fauci, who at age 85 is now facing a potential charge of criminal contempt. At a Congressional hearing led by Republican Senator Rand Paul in July, Fauci followed the advice of his attorney and invoked the Fifth Amendment because of Paul’s “unhinged obsession,” Fauci explaining: “The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”
Much of the specific conversation in “Kramer/Fauci” is now out-of-date; little more than two years later, the development of protease inhibitors completely hanged the landscape of AIDS treatment. (It would have been useful to have a fact-based note in the program, updating their conversation.) But even the dozen callers into the program, whose comments range from passionate to supportive to ignorant, provide a glimpse into a parallel era of polarization over public health, even while actress Jennifer Seastone recites those comments in that chicken costume, or on roller skates.
Kramer/Fauci
St. Ann’s Warehouse through October 24
Running time: One hour, no intermission
Tickets: $59 – $84
Conceived and directed by Daniel Fish
Cast: Will Brill as Fauci, Thomas Jay Ryan as Kramer, Greig Sargeant as moderator, Jennifer Seastone as the callers
Scenic design by Jim Findlay, Joshua Higgason, and Amy Rubin, costume design by Terese Wadden, lighting design by Scott Zielinski, sound effects by Tei Blow, movement by Beth Gill.
