Larry Kramer and Anthony Fauci Had a Deep, Yet Combative, Friendship; Daniel Fish Is Now Bringing It to the Stage

In 1993, playwright and HIV/AIDS activist Larry Kramer and infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci went on a CSPAN television program together. There, the two men discussed the AIDS crisis, the actions (or lack thereof) in searching for a cure, and displayed their volatile relationship. In one memorable exchange, Kramer decried the lack of urgency on the part of the Clinton administration, while Fauci urged him to have faith in the scientific process. Kramer then said: “Tony, if you start that business about science isn't done that way, I'm gonna come on there and slap your face.”

Said Fauci, with complete sincerity: “I love you, Larry.” They were on the same team, though both have different methods for finding a solution. Kramer was fiery and demanding; Fauci was measured and steady. The drama present in that news program inspired Tony-nominated director Daniel Fish so much that he’s recreated the entirety of that 50-minute program, word for word. Tony winner Will Brill will play Fauci, Thomas Jay Ryan will play Kramer, Greig Sargeant will play journalist/moderator Steve Scully, and Jennifer Seastone will play all of the people who called into the program.

Kramer/Fauci runs at NYU Skirball February 11–21.

“Larry Kramer has always been very important to me,” says Fish. “I saw the original Normal Heart when I was very young, and it remains one of a handful of the great shattering evenings that I've had in the theatre to this day. When Larry Kramer died [in 2020], I was reading a bunch of obituaries, and I read an article that Anthony Fauci had written, and that led me down a Google search. And then I found this program right around the time [Kramer] died and began thinking that it might be an interesting performance.”

Fish is most known for his modern revival of the classic Broadway musical Oklahoma!—this production reunites him with Brill, who he worked with on that musical. But Fish has also made a career of adapting found texts for the stage, such as 2012’s A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (After David Foster Wallace) or 2019’s White Noise, inspired by Don DeLillo’s novel that also played at Skirball. 

The CSPAN conversation between Kramer and Fauci came right before a major moment in the AIDS crisis; by that point, around 200,000 people had died of the disease in America—Kramer called it in the broadcast an “intentional genocide” on the part of the American government due their neglect of the gay community.

But it was also an illuminating conversation—people called in on the air and left a variety of comments, including one caller who revealed his sister (who was not gay) had died of the disease. Then there was the timing, 1993, three years before the first major medical breakthrough in treating HIV came to the market, highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART).

Says Fish: “It was a moment before the drugs that really started helping had gotten to people, and Larry Kramer was pushing for these drugs to be tested, and they hadn't yet been tested. So it is a pivotal moment. People were really dying. People are really being infected. And it's a very, very dark, terrible moment, certainly for the gay population, but also the straight population and anybody who was infected or could be infected.”

And at the center of that CSPAN conversation were those two men—polar opposites in temperament but drawn together by their commitment to the people who were infected by HIV/AIDS. Their relationship was particularly fascinating for Fish: "I found their relationship to be a really interesting one—one that started off in a very divisive way and emerged into a very deep friendship. That's what drew me into it, and just how moved I was and compelled I was, and the most entertained I was every time I listened to it."

In staging Kramer/Fauci, Fish isn’t just trying for a complete recreation of the CSPAN conversation: For one, Kramer and Fauci weren’t even in the same room for it—the former was in New York while the latter was in Washington, D.C. Brill and Ryan also won’t be made up to look exactly like Fauci and Kramer. Instead, Fish wants the work to feel “contemporary” instead of period: "It's this event from the 90s, recreated and looked at from the moment that we are in now."

Kramer/Fauci is being staged during another complicated moment for public health. Fauci was, after all, a key player in the COVID-19 pandemic in his role as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Then there's the current state of the National Institute of Health under vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Fish declines to comment on the contemporary resonances of the play, and also says “I don’t know” when asked if Fauci is aware of the play. Instead, he encourages audiences to have their own responses to Kramer/Fauci.

“The piece is really about what happens when I put these wonderful actors, this material, this text, these characters who originally spoke to them, what happens when I put all of those things together in space, in time, in the moment that we are living in, and put that before an audience,” explains Fish. “Making this on the Skirball stage—which is this great, wonderful, vast stage: What happens when all four of these people are actually in the same room, and what's the nature of proximity and distance, and how does that interact with this material?”

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