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Theater review by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★★ (firmly recommended)
Ticketing: Buy tickets here
The late gay writer and activist Larry Kramer was, at his best, an incredible pain in the ass. The character who represents him in The Normal Heart, Kramer’s own 1985 play about the early years of AIDS, is so abrasive and inflexible that he is banished from the group he’d helped assemble to combat the growing plague; in real life, that group was the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and Kramer would go on to found the more aggressive protest outfit ACT UP. He was the right man for that time, because his fathomless reserves of righteous fury—as reflected, say, in his 1978 novel Faggots, a takedown of gay promiscuity in the disco era—were finally proportional to their target: the murderous inadequacy of the response to AIDS by the government, the public and the medical establishment.
Kramer’s rage was initially directed at, among many others, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a wing of the National Institutes of Health. “I Call You Murderers” was the headline of his 1988 op-ed in The San Francisco Examiner, which he called “an open letter to an incompetent idiot, Dr. Anthony Fauci.” Over the years, Kramer’s temper was tempered by respect, and the two men grew much closer, as Fauci described in a touching memorial to Kramer in 2023. The tensions and affections that characterized their bond are brought to theatrical life in director Daniel Fish’s engrossing Kramer/Fauci.
The text of Kramer/Fauci is a word-for-word transcript of the two men’s co-appearance on a 1993 C-SPAN call-in show about the Clinton Administration's evolving policies on AIDS research and prevention. “Tony, if you start that business about science isn't done that way, I'm gonna come on there and slap your face,” says Kramer in one heated exchange. “All right, Larry, hang on for a sec,” says Fauci, affectionately adding, “I love you, Larry.” You can watch the entire original program yourself on YouTube, courtesy of C-SPAN, but Fish’s account of it adds fascinating dimensions.
Like Tina Satter’s Is This A Room, Kramer/Fauci combines the meticulous historical factuality of a verbatim script with decisively avant-garde aesthetics. Off Broadway all-stars Thomas Jay Ryan (as Kramer), Will Brill (as Fauci) and Greig Sargeant (as interview Steve Scully) stake out positions on the mostly empty stage and deliver most of their lines out to the audience; Jennifer Seastone, who voices all 11 of the viewers who call in, begins the show on rollerblades, then dons an inflatable chicken costume. (The callers’ attitudes range from disgust to passionate sympathy.) In the production’s most indelible sequence, the dialogue halts for roughly four minutes straight as a wheeled contraption—with a large, fleshy tube attached to a fan—spews bubbles so copiously that the rising white tide threatens to submerge Kramer entirely as he sits impassively next to the machine; later, Fauci lies down on the floor amid the subsiding froth, reclining on one side like a deity perched on a cloud.
What such gestures might mean is up to interpretation. Is the foam meant to seem seminal? Does its accumulation suggest the epidemic, or the discourse, or the bureaucracy, or the mounting sense of overwhelm? Or all of these, or none? Whatever they signify, Fish’s avant-garde flourishes serve the production merely by existing and compelling attention. As you watch the bubbles crest and fall in waves, then gradually pop and dissolve, your impulse toward interpretation is complicated by their hypnotic random beauty. It’s a bit like watching the flames of a fire that is burning down a house.
The strangeness of the experience heightens the theatricality of a conversation that was already, Fish implies, a form of public performance, with Kramer and Fauci playing parts they have chosen—Fauci as the sober and fair-minded public servant, Larry as the source of unquenchable outrage and urgency—as they push toward a shared resolution. The actors heighten these essences instead of imitating their subjects: Brill is all teflon patience, and Ryan is sterner and more Jeremaiac in tone than the real Kramer, who smiled more often and spoke with a soft, weary-gay wryness.
Kramer himself pulls down the mask at one point when he faults Fauci for talking a different game in private than on television, but he also recognizes the necessity of doing so; elsewhere, he praises Fauci for his willingness to absorb public abuse for the sake of maintaining relationships with White House administrations—which, as we know, would also be a factor in Fauci’s later fight against COVID. (A shadow passes through the play when Fauci speculates about “a disease that’s spread by respiratory spread, where you sneeze on somebody, and you can impart upon them a lethal disease.”) Observing their tag team inspires a deeper appreciation for both men’s roles and bracingly invites us to navigate a cultural moment caught between Kramer's rock and Fauci's hard place.
Kramer/Fauci. St Ann’s Warehouse (Off Broadway). Conceived and directed by Daniel Fish. With Thomas Jay Ryan, Will Brill, Greig Sargeant, Jennifer Seastone. Running time: 1hr. No intermission.
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