DANIEL FISH: KRAMER/FAUCI
Presented by NYU Skirball In association with The Collapsable Giraffe and OHenry Productions
Conceived and Directed by Daniel Fish
NYU Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Place, in Manhattan
February 11, 2026 - February 21, 2026
Internationally acclaimed director Daniel Fish turns his gaze to one of the most combustible exchanges of the AIDS crisis: the 1993 televised confrontation between Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading AIDS researcher, and playwright-activist Larry Kramer. Charged with rage, urgency, and an undercurrent of startling intimacy, the debate marked a pivotal moment in the struggle for care, treatment, and public recognition. In this world premiere, Fish’s Kramer/Fauci reframes their clash, verbatim as per the transcript of the event, down to every ‘er’and ‘um’, as both historical document and living provocation—a searing reminder of how art, activism, and public health collide on profoundly human terms.
There is something bracing, even vertiginous, about encountering Kramer/Fauci at this particular historical juncture. The production hovers between time capsule and séance: a reconstruction of AIDS policy in the early nineteen-nineties that doubles as a meditation on our own post-pandemic bewilderment. It seems almost implausible that Anthony Fauci’s career should arc from the height of the H.I.V./AIDS crisis to the daily briefings of COVID-19, and yet here he is—central, embattled, indispensable—in each crisis, firmly positioned as the face of science.
Conceived and directed by Fish, the production stages a sometimes absurdist reimagining of the 1993 C-Span debate between the playwright and activist Larry Kramer (Thomas Jay Ryan), a man incandescent with fury, and Fauci (Will Brill), then Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, whose equanimity often masked a ferocious internal calculus. Clips of the original broadcast remain available online: Fauci in the D.C. studio with the Moderator; Kramer in New York, patched in remotely, able to hear but not see, a technological indignity that only sharpened his impatience.
Fish transposes this televisual exchange to the vast Skirball stage. The unnamed Moderator (Greig Sargeant) glides about in a rolling office chair, fielding questions and callers. The Callers—from all and sundry, incarnated by Jennifer Seastone—dial in to query, lament, or scold, their concerns circling what Kramer insists on calling a plague. On the stripped-down stage conceived by Jim Findlay, Josh Higgason, and Amy Rubin, austerity becomes a kind of moral frame. The set is little more than an exposed expanse, backed by a grid of fifty-four house-facing lights that glare toward the audience like an interrogatory wall. The lighting, stark and unsparing, is by Scott Zielinski. Within this skeletal architecture, the actors deliver every line in meticulous sync with the original 1993 broadcast, guided by in-ear monitors through which the archival audio feeds directly into their bodies. The effect is uncanny: performance as ventriloquism, history coursing through living flesh, each pause and interruption preserved with documentary precision.
At the heart of the debate lies a relationship as intimate as it is antagonistic. Fauci is, for Kramer, both ally and obstacle. The activist who excoriated the federal government for its lethal complacency also professed his love for “Tony.” The two men are fighting together and against each other, bound by a shared objective—saving lives—yet divided by temperament and tactics. Affection shades into anger; admiration into exasperation. Kramer can acknowledge the multiplicity of Fauci’s roles—doctor, scientist, public servant—yet he bristles whenever the immunologist retreats into bureaucratic circumlocution.
Fauci, as Brill portrays him, walks a tightrope that Kramer himself recognizes. He must secure funding for research, shepherd drug trials through labyrinthine protocols, and negotiate with political factions that share little common ground. He is diplomat and advocate at once. It is a crucial conceit that Fauci purposely asked for Kramer to be included in the event that was originally intended as a Town Hall of sorts for Fauci alone. Kramer, by contrast, has no patience for diplomacy. Delays in drug approval are not procedural hiccups but death sentences. Indifference to the dying, and the contempt directed at gay men during what was dismissively labeled a “gay disease,” demand not discussion but action. For Kramer, this is a matter of survival and principle, inseparable.
What moves us most is the sheer complexity of this dynamic—the degree to which both men understand the other’s constraints, even as they refuse to concede. Ryan’s Kramer prowls the stage, hugging a proscenium column as if it were a comrade, lunging into the faces of interlocutors (and, at one point, a person in a chicken suit). Brill’s Fauci remains cooler, listening intently, pushing back gently but firmly, his Brooklyn cadences grounding the rhetoric in lived reality. He never quite loses his composure, even when confronted with exaggeration or accusation.
The 1993 exchange was at once incendiary and clarifying, a public quarrel that exposed not only ideological fault lines but the fragile humanity beneath them. Even at his most combative, Larry Kramer understood the impossible burden borne by Anthony Fauci. “He is a man, an ordinary man, who is being asked to play God,” Kramer observed at the time. “And he is being punished because he cannot be God. And that is a terrible position to be in.” It was a statement at once accusatory and compassionate—an acknowledgment that the fury directed at Fauci was inseparable from the desperation of those watching friends and lovers die, and from the unbearable expectation that one mortal figure might somehow command a plague to halt.
And then there is the character of the “bubble machine”. When it is wheeled onstage, it appears at first as an ungainly contraption; once activated, it unleashes a tidal wave of suds, a billowing cloud that engulfs Kramer in something like fragile transcendence. The image is unexpectedly beautiful—a fleeting vision of release. Brill and Ryan navigate gamely through the accumulating foam as they spar, the debate continuing even as their hems darken and cling. The suds render them faintly ridiculous and faintly heroic—two men arguing policy while wading through the residue of spectacle. Costume designer Terese Wadden underscores their opposition with deft economy: Fauci is sheathed in an unremarkable, off-the-rack business suit, the uniform of the institutional insider, while Kramer’s navy sweater lends him a severity, as though he were an ascetic prophet pacing the cloister of his own outrage.Yet the play doesn’t end on that note. The bubbles collapse into puddles; squeegees appear; reality reasserts itself, damp and unromantic. Deflation, here, is part of the argument.
In truth, the production needs little embellishment. The debate itself—the clash of temperaments and ideologies—is riveting enough. The power resides in the words: Kramer’s mordant humor and volcanic indignation; Fauci’s measured insistence on evidence and process. Watching them spar, one questions if it’s really a debate at all as both men truly want the same outcome.
The play’s contemporary echoes are impossible to ignore. Kramer’s complaints about public cruelty, about media failures, reverberate uncannily in the wake of COVID-19. Most piercing is Kramer’s admission that the struggle has so consumed him that his prior life feels irretrievable, as though AIDS cleaved his existence in two. That sense of rupture, once historical, now feels personal. The pandemic has rewritten many of us, altering not just our habits but our sense of continuity with who we were.
Kramer/Fauci does not pretend to offer solutions. It offers, instead, a study in endurance. Two brilliant, flawed men, confronting an unfathomable crisis, argue in public because they believe argument might bend the arc of policy toward mercy. In watching them, we are reminded that progress is rarely harmonious. It is cacophonous, bruising, propelled by those willing to keep climbing an unbearable hill long after the summit has disappeared from view.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on March 2nd, 2026. All rights reserved.
