Kramer and Fauci—Enemies to Friends to Protagonists
The bond between Anthony Fauci and Larry Kramer is one of history’s happy riddles. Fauci (immunologist, public-health official, mensch) and Kramer (writer, AIDS activist, crank) began as adversaries. In 1988, Kramer, angry about the government’s sluggish H.I.V. research, wrote an open letter that called Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an “incompetent idiot.” But they became wary allies. “I quickly realized that despite his sometimes provocative behavior, he was as noble as the most respected scientist and public servant,” Fauci wrote later. During the first Bush Administration, Kramer urged Fauci to chain himself to the White House fence. (He declined.) In 2020, Fauci, newly famous as the COVID pandemic’s explainer-in-chief, called Kramer, who was dying. “I love you, Tony,” Kramer said, weakly. “I love you, Larry,” Fauci replied.
Between these endpoints of hate and love came an hour-long C-SPAN broadcast, on November 30, 1993, in which the men quarrelled, teased, and fielded calls. The Clinton Administration had just announced an AIDS task force, which Fauci hoped would hasten drug development; Kramer, piped in on a janky remote line, slammed Fauci’s “bureaucratic bullshit” and called Clinton a “big wuss.” “I probably have a more complicated relationship with Tony than anybody in my entire life,” Kramer said. “He is a man, an ordinary man, who was being asked to play God, and he is being punished because he cannot be God.”
Not long after Kramer died, the theatre director Daniel Fish came across the video and was riveted. “There’s something about two people who are able to really argue and still pay attention and listen to each other that tragically no longer exists,” Fish said recently. He was at St. Ann’s Warehouse, in Dumbo, where “Kramer/Fauci,” his piece drawn from the transcript, is playing. He was joined, after a tech rehearsal, by the actors Thomas Jay Ryan (Kramer) and Will Brill (Fauci), who wear earpieces onstage that play the 1993 audio, “like we’re singing along to an hour-long song,” Brill said.
Fish, known for his darkly sexy take on “Oklahoma!,” didn’t alter the text but toys with it like Silly Putty. The actress Jennifer Seastone, who plays all the callers, appears on Rollerblades, or in a chicken costume. Halfway through, Brill pulls out a machine that fills the stage with foam, submerging the actors in a cumulus of bubbles. (“It’s something that I’ve been interested in using onstage for a long time,” Fish explained.) Other theatrical flourishes died in rehearsal. They’d discussed Kramer and Fauci pausing to sing “Sue Me,” from “Guys and Dolls.” (“You promise me this, / You promise me that!”) “There was a moment when we had a kiss,” Brill recalled. “We never actually did nudity, but we did talk about nudity.”
Neither actor went for an exact impersonation, although Brill approximates Fauci’s Brooklyn accent. Brill spent the first stretch of the pandemic in Hell’s Kitchen, getting over both COVID and a breakup, occasionally turning on Fauci’s briefings. “I admired his knowledge and his ability to be stoic and politic, even when surrounded by absolute buffoonery,” he said. Ryan’s connection to Kramer was personal. He moved to New York in the mid-eighties, as a young gay actor, and read Kramer’s anti-Reagan screeds. “I was scared of all of it,” Ryan said. “I couldn’t hear any of it, because he was too scary a figure.”
They pulled up a clip of the 1993 broadcast:
“The way that Larry makes Tony laugh is so cute,” Brill said.
“But every time a moment of warmth like that happens, Larry will jerk the rug,” Ryan observed.
They watched a second clip: July 29, 2026, when an older, wearier Fauci was summoned to the Senate. Josh Hawley, attempting to shame the doctor, asks him such questions as “What color tie are you wearing?” as Fauci repeatedly takes the Fifth. “It’s so tough to watch,” Brill said, choking up, “because we’ve seen Tony speak so eloquently with someone who is truly intellectually sparring with him, and this shit was so disingenuous.”
When “Kramer/Fauci” was staged in February, at the N.Y.U. Skirball Center, Fauci went to the opening night, along with Kramer’s widower, ACT UP veterans, and some burly security men. “Tony said that we all did a good job,” Brill recalled. He described Fauci telling the actors about another contentious appearance with Kramer. “Larry was really lighting into him very badly on TV, and Tony was very shaken by it,” Brill said. “He got home, and the moment he walked in the door, he picked up the phone, and Larry said, ‘Weren’t we so good today?’ ” ♦