AIDS Activism Returns to the Stage in Kramer/Fauci

A word-for-word re-creation of a 1993 C-SPAN interview between AIDS activist Larry Kramer and Anthony Fauci is now playing again at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, following a winter presentation at New York University’s Skirball Center in Greenwich Village. The performance sets a public-health official’s defense of scientific and bureaucratic processes against Kramer’s urgent calls for action during the AIDS crisis.

The Argument on Stage

Kramer, who knew he was H.I.V. positive, called AIDS the “plague” and pressed Fauci to act. At the time, Fauci headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Kramer argued with him, praised him and criticized him during the interview, as Fauci defended scientific and bureaucratic processes that were beginning to sound hollow to people living through the crisis.

Director Daniel Fish left the interview transcript intact but changed how the scene played. A machine spews foam, giving shape to a growing sense of catastrophe. Actors Will Brill, as Fauci, and Thomas Jay Ryan, as Kramer, wore earpieces with the original audio so they wouldn’t leave out a word.

The scene unfolds when Kramer was at an emotional low, fighting for his life and expecting he would likely lose that battle. The performance keeps the audience inside that moment. It doesn’t present the interview as a settled account of the crisis.

Hope that Bill Clinton’s election as president would change everything had started to fade before Clinton finished his first year in office. The interview’s argument set the demands of people confronting AIDS against the pace and procedures of the government response.

A Movement’s Memory

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.

In 1987, Kramer proposed forming ACT UP at the Center, the gay and lesbian community space near the home he shared with his husband, David Webster. The theater stood a short walk from the Center. Kramer died at 84 in 2020.

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

The Crisis and Its Aftermath

Forty-five years have passed since the first reports of what was then called a “rare cancer.” In 1981, the syndrome had no name and no known cause. The article describes the AIDS era as the pandemic’s first 15 years, when many gay people were grateful to push it to the back of their minds once relief arrived.

Three decades before the article, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that, for the first time, the number of Americans who died from AIDS and related causes had fallen substantially from the previous year. Deaths still numbered in the tens of thousands. The article credits antiretroviral therapy with the change, allowing many gay men to replace fear with hope.

The recent artistic work described in the article has a mission: keep the struggle from fading into abstraction. AIDS remains shared history and common lineage for people who lost loved ones, and for people who know H.I.V. as a manageable condition that once meant a death sentence.