Though it aired on C-SPAN, a 1993 brawl about AIDS research had the elements of a prime-time network drama. Larry Kramer, the writer and AIDS activist, and Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were the combatants. The setting was a live call-in program intended to be a discussion about a new AIDS task force initiated by the Clinton administration. Adding fuel to the conversation: long-simmering tensions, back stories, deadly stakes and a handful of anonymous callers with questions, confusion and vendettas.
You could hardly write a better hour of television.
“Tony, if you start that business about, ‘Science isn’t done that way,’ I’m going to come down there and slap your face.”
“All right, Larry, hang on for a sec. I love you, Larry.”
Now this contentious conversation is the focus of the director Daniel Fish’s “Kramer/Fauci,” a verbatim staging at NYU Skirball through Feb. 21. Running one hour, the same as the original C-SPAN program, the performance is a mix of documentary and theatrical invention. The actors — Thomas Jay Ryan (Kramer) and Will Brill (Fauci) — will not be made up to look like their characters, nor directed toward impersonation.
“The piece is not meant to be a biopic, or even a character study,” Fish said in an interview last week. “It’s looking at a particular moment in time from a different moment in time. That’s what I’m interested in: How do we experience this conversation now, with all we know?”
The interview shows a surprisingly measured side of the typically confrontational Kramer, a founder of the direct action group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). And those familiar with Fauci as an urgent crusader against the coronavirus might be jolted by seeing him defend a slow, bureaucratic process.
By the time the cameras rolled, the men already knew what to expect from each other. Years earlier, in a 1988 open letter published by The Village Voice, Kramer had called Fauci “a murderer” and “an incompetent idiot” for the government’s inaction over the AIDS epidemic. But their relationship evolved: Though Kramer was an activist and Fauci a scientist in the regulatory establishment, they were working toward a common goal and, in the process, developed a deep friendship. Fauci even gave a moving speech at Kramer’s memorial service in 2023.
“They’re both aware of what they’re doing, the roles they’re playing,” Fish said. “Fauci knows Kramer’s going to get angry at certain things. Kramer knows Fauci’s going to be diplomatic about this. It’s a dance that they know how to do, and every once in a while it goes farther.”
Fish found the interview online shortly after Kramer’s death in 2020 and was struck to hear the activist describe his relationship to Fauci as the most complicated in his life.
“They figured out a way to, in a sense, work together, and there’s something really interesting in their relationship that, in the course of this one conversation, goes from ‘I hate you’ to ‘I love you’ and back,” Fish said. “It’s not like they suppressed their differences, but somehow, that didn’t prevent them from communicating with each other. On a very basic level, I found the conversation entertaining, compelling and moving.”
Steve Scully, the former C-SPAN political editor who hosted the program, said in a phone call this week that he had been prepared for dueling opinions, but had never experienced that level of crossfire. He explained that it was Fauci’s choice to include Kramer.
“He welcomed having somebody who was basically his sparring partner, but did so with a level of respect, even though Kramer, as you can see, was getting pretty upset that the Clinton administration kept kicking the can down the road,” Scully said. “He knew Larry was going to hold his feet to the fire on what he felt needed to be done.”
Fish said he didn’t want to just replicate a television studio setting. There are “a few gestures in there that hopefully bring both some humor and some strangeness to it,” he said. Among them, at least at a recent rehearsal, was Jennifer Seastone, who plays all of the callers, delivered a speech while on roller skates.
The performers wear earpieces in order to maintain the interview’s brisk pace. On a video call, Brill and Ryan said they initially resisted this, for fear it would inhibit their interpretations.
Brill, as Fauci, has since allowed himself to veer toward an accent: “I will slip into his rhythm and intonation so intensely that I surprise myself that I’ve remembered it. It feels like a flow state, like I am channeling rather than acting.”
But for Ryan, the experience of playing Kramer has led to self-reflection.
“I’m feeling my own relationship to what it is to be a gay man in my early 60s, not having shown up in the way I wish I had for this man, these issues, my community, for very selfish reasons that I forgive myself for, but still,” he said. “I’m in conversation every night with that, and I think a lot of people my age can respond to that.”
Ryan noted the theater’s location in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood considered “the epicenter of the epidemic in the city,” and the possibility that many in the audience will have known Kramer, or lost loved ones to AIDS.
“I don’t look like Larry Kramer, as most people who find out I’m doing this are very quick to tell me,” he said. “What I can do is provide a platform by which his words and passions can be heard. That’s so much more important than, ‘Look, he moved his arms like Larry did.’”
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