AIDS History Returns to the Stage in Kramer/Fauci

The staging of “Kramer/Fauci,” a word-for-word re-creation of a 1993 C-SPAN interview about AIDS, has brought the crisis back into cultural view. This past winter, New York University’s Skirball Center in Greenwich Village presented the production. It’s now being restaged at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

The performance preserves the confrontation between playwright and activist Larry Kramer and Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Kramer fought with Fauci, praised him and criticized him, repeatedly calling AIDS the “plague” and urging him to act. The transcript remains intact. Actors Will Brill and Thomas Jay Ryan wear earpieces carrying the original audio, so they won’t omit a word.

A record of the crisis

Director Daniel Fish made imaginative changes to the staging, including a machine that spews foam to represent a growing sense of catastrophe. The words, though, come from the original interview. That choice keeps the audience inside the exchange as it happened, rather than offering a later reconstruction of what its participants might have said.

Kramer knew he was H.I.V. positive and was at an emotional low, fighting for his life while expecting he’d likely lose the battle. The debate came a dozen years into the crisis. Fauci’s defense of scientific and bureaucratic processes was beginning to sound hollow to desperate people, while hope that Bill Clinton’s election would change everything faded before Clinton had completed his first year in office.

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

LGBTQ people in their 30s and 40s and NYU students were there, too. They were 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 an opportunity to examine something real.

Memory across generations

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 ACT UP in 1987. Kramer died at 84 in 2020. The performance returns his public arguments to a place connected to both his activism and personal life.

The article describes the AIDS era as the first 15 years of the pandemic. Many gay people were grateful to push it to the back of their minds when relief came, but gay men of almost any age understand themselves as living somewhere on the timeline of a crisis that once defined their community. For people who lost loved ones, and for those who know H.I.V. as a manageable condition that used to be a death sentence, AIDS remains shared history and common lineage.

Forty-five years have passed since the initial reports of what was then described as a “rare cancer.” In 1981, the syndrome had no name or known cause. Three decades before the article, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a turning point in the United States: AIDS and related deaths, though still in the tens of thousands, had fallen substantially from the previous year. The article credits the introduction of antiretroviral therapy, which allowed many gay men to replace fear with hope.

Recent artistic work, the article says, carries a sense of mission: keeping the struggle from fading into abstraction. “Kramer/Fauci” puts the words, urgency and conflict of the period before audiences who remember it and students encountering it as history.