Kramer/Fauci Walks Out of the Archives and Straight Into Our Moment

My colleague Helen Shaw has made the point that theater critics, covering an ephemeral form, bear the “exciting burden” of “not just writing the report, but … writing the record.” The live performance evaporates; the written word remains. But what if, just hypothetically, we lived in a moment and a country with an aversion to our own history? A moment where a record exists for us and we are at best widely ignorant of it, and at worst actively working against its lessons?

Daniel Fish’s brief, potent Kramer/Fauci makes the argument that in such a moment, this highly transient art form might, in a kind of heroic paradox, come to the rescue, reopening our eyes to what’s been in front of them for decades if we’d only let ourselves look. As a director, Fish has taken subversive, revelatory approaches to the theatrical canon and has adapted, for a taste, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. Here, he’s turned a 1993 television transcript into a play — only an hour long, staged mostly with four bodies in an empty space — that’s spare, anti-emotional, and deeply stirring.

Perhaps anti-emotional isn’t quite right: Kramer/Fauci is full of feeling, but the figure who most unapologetically wields it over the course of the show’s taut 60 minutes does so with such an iron sense of purpose that the sticky drip of sentiment has no crack to sneak in. That figure is the first half of the show’s title, the activist, author, and playwright Larry Kramer, who co-founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP and was instrumental in bringing the AIDS crisis to public attention. After the slash is — at least as Fish’s dramatization stages it — Kramer’s great foil: both a friend and a maddening frustration, the cool-headed man of science to his hot-blooded champion of ethics, the bureaucrat to his firebrand, the same Anthony Fauci who still, today, sits calmly across from idiot politicians bent on indicting him while he attempts to go about his business of dealing with the next plague.

All the text of Kramer/Fauci is taken from a C-SPAN call-in broadcast aired on November 30, 1993, the day before World AIDS Day. Kramer and Dr. Fauci participated while the journalist Steve Scully moderated — but moderation was never Kramer’s plan. “What one never feels anywhere, anywhere in thirteen friggin’ years of this, is a sense of urgency, urgency, urgency,” he lets rip in response to the Clinton administration’s plan to form “another task force” on AIDS. On Fish’s stage — the stripped brick expanse of St. Ann’s Warehouse, backed by a grid of blinding lights that periodically cut the actors out in silhouette — the excellent Thomas Jay Ryan gives Kramer an adamantine backbone. Shoulders sloped, in a dark turtleneck and corduroys, he’s a mild looking middle-aged man with a lion inside: When his voice does rise to a shout, his body tightens and focuses, intensifying and directing his power rather than dispersing it. He is unignorable, even when his interlocutors consider him unreasonable.

Across from Ryan, the irresistible chameleon Will Brill nimbly conjures Fauci’s studied equanimity, his dedication to fact and predilection for good humor, the diplomacy, the tinge of Brooklyn accent. Like the performers in Tina Satter’s chilling verbatim play Is This a Room, Brill and Ryan aren’t dead ringers for the men whose words they’re speaking, nor are they meant to be — what matters is their meticulousness and nerve. They capture every pause, each cough and mumble and fluctuation in intensity, and the way Fish arranges them in space adds layers of resonance, defamiliarizing the colloquial flow of their speech, forcing us to watch and listen for deeper strata of meaning.

As Kramer/Fauci begins, its performers face us in a spread-out triangle, Brill at its apex, closest to the audience, and Ryan at a second point buried deep at the back of the stage; Greig Sargeant sits between them as the C-SPAN moderator, and Jennifer Seastone, embodying all the callers to the program, creates the third point of the shape. It’s already a symbolic one, and it quickly becomes funny, too: “I can’t see you. And I can’t hear you very well… this earpiece is not, uh, is circa 1920,” Kramer, who’s not in the studio with Fauci, gripes lightly as he adjusts to his fuzzy connection. But it’s also more: Fish is spatializing certain dynamics — the onus on Fauci to be public-facing and reassuring, to stand in the spotlight and stick to a certain script, along with the distance between the activist and the policy-maker whom he’s pushing for change. Of all the play’s actors, Ryan moves the most: He marches back and forth across the room, he gets up in people’s faces, he even — when Fish eventually deploys the production’s single, and wonderful, visual metaphor — throws himself into clean-up duty. The implication is clear: Power to pass laws, to run drug trials, to make medication available, to take any number of actions on a national scale may lie elsewhere, but without the urgency-urgency-urgency of the Larry Kramers of the world, such power does no good on its own.

And Brill’s Fauci knows it, though he might play it close to the chest. He and Kramer aren’t enemies. They are men who, in a shared fight, have chosen very different weapons. Despite, or rather alongside Kramer’s rage, there’s audible affection between them. “I love you, Larry,” Brill chuckles, a little uneasily, whenever Ryan tears into him. “I think Tony answered it very well,” Ryan’s Kramer says, uncharacteristically quiet with heartache, after Fauci has fielded a caller’s homophobic question. As a piece of theater, the dialogue between the two men often lands on the heart like a wry, platonic romance — and the moments in which both take a stand against the bigotry of some of Seastone’s callers are suddenly and acutely poignant. “It’s a terrible idea, uh, from a public-health standpoint…” Fauci replies sternly when a caller suggests trying to force people with HIV to quarantine. “If you have a disease that’s spread by respiratory spread, where you sneeze on somebody and you can impart upon them a lethal disease, that’s a different story, but a disease that’s transmitted by sex, by drugs, or by drug use … or by blood and blood products, the answer is not to sequester and quarantine people. That is a very bad public health idea, not to mention ethical and moral and a few other things.” 

A cold shiver goes through the room on “respiratory.” The words Brill and Ryan are channeling were spoken in 1993, but not even 25 years later, whether or not we lived through the horrific initial decades of AIDS, we’ve all experienced a disease that wrought not only mass death but also division and disenchantment. “I guess if I had to be asked, what’s the main thing I’ve learned in the last twelve years, it’s how really shitty people can be to each other and how awful the human race is when you’re not a straight, white, rich man…” says Ryan, tough and grieving as Kramer, a ghost from the archive whose voice tears through the present. “Everybody else is pretty much, and can be pretty much, allowed to die.” 

Kramer/Fauci is at St. Ann’s Warehouse through October 24.