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A new play exploring the complex relationship between playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer and Dr. Anthony FauciThe longtime top US infectious disease expert will premiere early next year new york Directed by Tony Award winner Daniels fish,
“Kramer/Fauci” stars “Stereophonic” Tony-winner Will Brill and “Henry Fool” star Thomas J. Ryan. It will play at The Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts from Feb. 11-21, the AP has learned.
Fish, whose 2019 adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” won tony awards For Best Musical Revival, the transcript of the 1993 C-SPAN face-off between the two men is being used as the text of the play, which included call-ins from across the country.
“I’m looking at a particular moment in time, looking at a particular exchange that has resonance in their relationship, that has resonance in the politics and culture of that time, and looking at what happens when we do that now. That’s really where I’m coming from,” Fish said.
Cramer and Fauci went from adversaries to friends as they faced the AIDS crisis from different sides in the 1980s and 90s. Kramer, who wrote “The Normal Heart” and founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, called on the government to do more and faster for people with symptoms.
Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, emphasized a pragmatic approach. He would again become a lightning rod in 2020 as the leader of the national response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The exchange was heated and illuminating in 1993, with Kramer acknowledging their complicated relationship: “He’s a man, an ordinary man, who is being asked to play God,” Kramer said at the time. “And he’s being punished because he can’t be God. And that’s a terrible situation.”
After Kramer’s death in 2020, Fish stumbled into the C-SPAN exchange. He said, “I thought it was really compelling and it stayed with me.” “And after a while I thought, ‘I wonder what would happen if we performed this?'”
Pisces doesn’t want to entertain a literal exchange, but wants to move toward something more dramatic. In 1993, Kramer was flown in from New York while Fauci was in the C-SPAN studios in Washington, D.C. For the skit, Fish would put both – as well as the moderator – in the same room on stage.
“There’s a moment when Kramer says at one point, ‘You know, I love Tony Fauci,’ and later he says, ‘Tony, I hate you when you talk like that.’ And Fauci says, ‘I know you do, Larry.'”