Kramer/Fauci

Daniel Fish directed this, so I’d expect to hate it. But Kramer/Fauci, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, turns out to be a bracing staging of a notable hour of broadcast history. The Fish eccentricities do accumulate, but they’re less baffling than usual, and even, in one large instance, justifiable.

That hour happened on CSPAN, on Nov. 30, 1993. Anthony Fauci (Will Brill), then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Larry Kramer (Thomas Jay Ryan), writer, AIDS activist, and nonstop provocateur, met to discuss AIDS, and more specifically the Clinton administration’s handling of it. A moderator (Greig Sargeant) did his best to keep Kramer from overpowering Fauci, and callers-in (Jennifer Seastone plays them all) commented on the ongoing AIDS crisis, the progress or lack thereof in combating it, and the personality quirks in both men and how those were affecting the effort.

St. Ann’s has a vast, deep stage, and at first it’s empty, except for an upstage wall far, far back with a panel of blinding lights. (Jim Findlay, Joshua Higgason, and Amy Rubin are credited with scenic design; this really took three people? Scott Zielinski designed the super-bright lighting, which does calm down.) When the actors enter, they assume stances wide apart from one another, and Seastone enters on roller skates, why I’ve no idea. But this is Daniel Fish, and we know he’s not going to stage a literal re-creation.

No, he’s out to theatricalize what was probably a pretty dull hour visually. The first 20 or so minutes evolve more or less naturally, and then… the stage having cleared, Ryan re-enters, standing next to a contraption that’s been wheeled out, and foam begins to issue from it, lots and lots of foam. It takes five minutes, engulfing Ryan and most of the stage—that’s all that’s happening, and couldn’t Fish have at least given Ryan a little physical business to liven things up?—and at first one’s reaction is, oh, Daniel Fish being Daniel Fish. But think about it a little, and it’s an apt metaphor for AIDS at its peak: spreading uncontrollably, uncontainably. And when Ryan begins mopping it up, maybe that symbolizes the therapies that were beginning to yield tentative results.

Ryan and Brill have their real-life counterparts down pat. Kramer was, opinion is unanimous, a very annoying man, loud, rude, and given to emotional outbursts that alienated even those who supported him. At least half of his The Normal Heart, a fine play quite brilliantly revived 15 years ago, seems to say, “I’m Larry Kramer, I’m right and everyone else is wrong, and nobody’s listening to me.” Ryan gesticulates wildly, gets within inches of his adversaries (mostly Fauci) to jab and yell at them, and quiets down only when visibly moved by something, as when a caller relates losing her (or maybe his; the callers’ genders are frequently, frustratingly ambiguous) sister to AIDS, or in a rare moment of praising someone else—David Kessler, Merck, Fauci.

Brill’s Fauci, complete with conservative suit (costumes by Terese Wadden) and Brooklyn accent, is the conflicted public servant, trying to navigate the bureaucratic bounds dealt him, but aware of how constraining they are, and perhaps secretly in agreement when Kramer rails about task forces and committees: “This is a task force to identify what the stumbling blocks are, we know what they are, a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape, a lot of stupid laws by Congress, and a lot of idiots putting their two cents’ worth.”

They follow the CSPAN transcript exactly, right down to the “uh”s and the stuttering both indulged in, and it’s often riveting. Seastone—who at one point dons a yellow chicken suit, a Fish-ism I’m not getting—doesn’t vary her delivery of the callers very much, and thus isn’t as effective as she might be resurrecting the despair and panic so many felt at the time that an epidemic was turning into, as Kramer correctly called it, a plague. Sargeant, as the moderator, perfectly articulates those I’m-a-moderator stentorian tones.

The Kramer-Fauci relationship was fascinating. Though wildly divergent in lifestyle and tactics, both were fighting the same thing, and remained allies even as they sparred violently. Fauci had to endure Kramer’s frequent tantrums and outrage, but says more than once here, “I love you, Larry,” while Kramer reciprocates that love even as he screams at Fauci for playing along with Clinton and Donna Shalala. Fish’s non-literal staging of the CSPAN hour, with the four actors often wide apart, accentuates the isolation and loneliness so many felt as AIDS ravaged a community, and Tei Blow’s sound design, with only the moderator grasping a hand mike, is both natural and gratifyingly audible.

I have to hand it to Fish. After turning Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! into a diatribe about how the land we belong to isn’t grand, but rather is exclusionary and classist, and after his upstate Most Happy tossed Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella into a blender and hit Frappé, here’s a quick evening that recaps a tense moment in American history with considerable style. And reminds us, if some of us need reminding, and some MAGAs clearly do, Anthony Fauci is an American hero.

Kramer/Fauci
At St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St., Brooklyn
Running time: 1 hour, no intermission
Through October 24, 2026