Kramer/Fauci at St. Ann’s Warehouse Stages a 1993 C-SPAN Call-In

Larry Kramer, by the account of Time Out New York’s Adam Feldman, was at his best an incredible pain in the ass. The character modeled on him in The Normal Heart, Kramer’s 1985 play about the early years of AIDS, is so abrasive that he is banished from the group he helped assemble; in life, that group was Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and Kramer went on to found the more aggressive ACT UP. His fury, Feldman writes, was finally proportional to its target: the inadequate response to AIDS from government, the public and the medical establishment.

One of the early targets was Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Kramer’s 1988 San Francisco Examiner op-ed was headlined “I Call You Murderers.” Over the years, Feldman notes, the antagonism gave way to respect and a much closer bond, which Fauci described in a 2023 memorial to Kramer. That relationship is the subject of Kramer/Fauci, now at St. Ann’s Warehouse and conceived and directed by Daniel Fish. Time Out gave it four stars.

The script is a word-for-word transcript of the two men’s joint appearance on a 1993 C-SPAN call-in show about the Clinton administration’s evolving AIDS research and prevention policies. In one exchange, Kramer warns Fauci he will “slap your face” if he starts in on how science isn’t done that way; Fauci answers, “All right, Larry, hang on for a sec,” and adds, “I love you, Larry.” The full program is available on YouTube through C-SPAN, but Feldman argues that Fish’s staging adds fascinating dimensions.

Like Tina Satter’s Is This a Room, the production pairs a meticulously factual verbatim text with decidedly avant-garde aesthetics. Thomas Jay Ryan plays Kramer, Will Brill plays Fauci and Greig Sargeant plays interviewer Steve Scully, all staking out spots on a mostly empty stage and delivering most lines outward to the audience. Jennifer Seastone voices all 11 callers, starting the show on rollerblades and later donning an inflatable chicken costume.

The production’s most indelible sequence, per the review, halts the dialogue for roughly four minutes while a wheeled contraption with a large, fleshy tube attached to a fan spews bubbles so copiously that the rising white tide threatens to submerge Kramer, who sits impassively beside it. Later, Fauci lies down amid the subsiding foam like a deity on a cloud. Feldman declines to fix a meaning on the image, whether the epidemic, the discourse or the bureaucracy, and says it works simply by compelling attention; he compares it to watching the flames of a fire burning down a house.

Fish’s approach, Feldman suggests, treats the original conversation as already a form of public performance: Fauci as the sober, fair-minded public servant, Kramer as the source of unquenchable urgency. The actors heighten those essences rather than imitate. Brill is all Teflon patience, while Ryan is sterner and more Jeremiac than the real Kramer, who Feldman says smiled more often and spoke with a soft, weary wryness.

The review also points to moments where the text takes on added weight. Kramer faults Fauci for talking differently in private than on television, yet recognizes the necessity of it, and praises him for absorbing public abuse to keep working relationships with White House administrations, a factor Feldman ties to Fauci’s later fight against COVID. A shadow passes over the play when Fauci speculates about a respiratory disease that could be passed by a sneeze.

Kramer/Fauci runs one hour with no intermission at St. Ann’s Warehouse. The cast also includes Seastone and Sargeant alongside Ryan and Brill.