Kramer/Fauci Puts AIDS Bureaucracy on Stage

Larry Kramer repeatedly called AIDS the “plague” and pressed Anthony Fauci to act. Their 1993 C-SPAN interview now plays word for word in “Kramer/Fauci,” putting a desperate activist’s clash with a senior public health official in front of an audience again. The production appeared this past winter at New York University’s Skirball Center in Greenwich Village and is now being restaged at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

A confrontation, word for word

Kramer knew he was H.I.V. positive during the interview. He was at an emotional low, fighting for his life and expecting he’d likely lose that battle. Fauci, who then led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, defended scientific and bureaucratic processes. For desperate people, that defense was starting to sound hollow.

Director Daniel Fish kept the transcript intact but made imaginative changes to the staging. A machine spews foam, representing a growing sense of catastrophe. Will Brill, playing Fauci, and Thomas Jay Ryan, playing Kramer, wore earpieces that carried the original audio so they wouldn’t leave out a word. The institutional official and the activist’s demands still meet in the same exchange. Neither has been rewritten to make the conflict more comfortable.

Survivors, former and current AIDS activists, gay historians, academics, writers, and veterans of Queer Nation and Gay Men’s Health Crisis filled the audience. Some had known Kramer, fought alongside him, or been dressed down, inspired, or alienated by him. Fauci attended opening night.

Organizing outside the official script

Kramer lived with his husband, David Webster, near the theater, a short walk from the Center, the gay and lesbian community space where he proposed forming the activist coalition ACT UP in 1987. The play’s argument with official process sits beside that organizing history: Kramer urged a government health official to act, while he proposed a coalition at a community space.

The hope that Bill Clinton’s election as president would change everything was fading before he’d completed his first year in office. The performance returns to that political disappointment, without presenting an election as an answer. Kramer died at 84 in 2020.

AIDS remains shared history and common lineage, the article says—for people who lost loved ones, and for people who know H.I.V. as a manageable condition that used to be a death sentence. Many gay people were grateful to push the crisis to the back of their minds once relief came. Recent artistic work, the article says, carries a mission to keep the struggle from fading into abstraction.

What the record carries forward

One student at the performance was studying Kramer’s 1985 play “The Normal Heart” in a 20th-century queer-literature class. He called “Kramer/Fauci” an “unearthed artifact” and an “opportunity to examine something real.” LGBTQ people in their 30s and 40s sat in the theater alongside NYU students too young to remember the period.

Forty-five years had passed since the first reports of what people then called a “rare cancer.” In 1981, the syndrome had no name or known cause. The article also says three decades had passed since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a turning point in the United States: for the first time, the number of Americans who died from AIDS and related causes, though still in the tens of thousands, had fallen substantially from the previous year. The article credits antiretroviral therapy with that change; it allowed many gay men to trade fear for hope. Relief changed what was possible. The performance preserves the voices from the struggle that came before it.