“Kramer/Fauci” at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival

The year is 1993. The 24-hour news cycle is roughly a decade into its existence. The first reported case of HIV/AIDS is also about ten years behind us. Anthony Fauci, serving as director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has agreed to participate in a live call-in show on C-SPAN. He will be in conversation with his longtime sparring partner, the irrepressible playwright/novelist-cum-AIDS activist Larry Kramer. The television event is equal parts drama, comedy, and tragedy. And now, director Daniel Fish has adapted it into a nearly perfect piece of theatre.

Kramer/Fauci, developed at NYU Skirball in early 2026, came to Philadelphia as part of this year’s Fringe Festival. Pete Simpson played Fauci, a case study in frustrated restraint, while Thomas Jay Ryan, as Larry Kramer, was clearly having a ball: seething, spewing, accusing, antagonizing. Jennifer Seastone performed a heavy lift, giving voice to the more than ten different call-in viewers, with subtle but appreciable accent work for each; though onstage the entire show, she managed to cede the spotlight to the two debaters, even when roller-skating or, briefly, dressed as a giant inflatable chicken. Greig Sargeant is seen here as the C-SPAN moderator, casting which links this show with Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge, which dramatized the 1965 debate between writer James Baldwin and conservative pundit William F. Buckley; Sargeant played Baldwin in a recent Elevator Repair Service production. Another important reference here is Frost/Nixon, although Fish does Frost/Nixon author Peter Morgan one better: this play is the verbatim transcript of the C-SPAN program.

The set is minimal. Bright lights greet audience members as they arrive, the moderator sits in a chair. The one exception to the stark design is an apparatus which, halfway through the performance, covers the stage with a blanket of bubbles. Bewildering, beautiful, silly, they threaten to bury Kramer, a possible metaphor for the disease. They soak Fauci’s respectable suit and inhibit his movement, a possible metaphor for bureaucracy. They pour forth from a phallic windsock, a possible homage to the theatrical tactics of ACT UP. And they turn a C-SPAN interview into theatre of the absurd, or reveal that it was this all along.

Using the original source material in this way had an effect I’ve never before witnessed in the theatre—the actors’ speech was completely natural, that is to say, unpolished. Or, as unpolished as two professional mouthpieces could possibly be. They tripped over their words, they stumbled, they backtracked. Seastone captured every “um” and mispronunciation of the callers-in. Kramer and Fauci interrupted each other in a way that felt precisely un-staged, but familiar from any recent live television debate, to say nothing of a family dinner. Even more remarkable was the complexity of the relationship revealed in this single encounter through the participants’ own words. To wit, both Fauci and Kramer repeatedly said to each other, “I love you.” Although they publicly took positions in tension with each other—Fauci the hamstrung government scientist and spokesperson and Kramer the incendiary advocate and founder of ACT UP—they were ultimately pulling in the same direction. Certainly, they shared an understanding of the cataclysmic nature of the AIDS and the profound injustice of the US government’s neglect of its victims. One could make the case that Fauci needed Kramer, who, in the play, is unafraid to insist on words like “urgency” and “plague,” and who occasionally plays fast and loose with facts. Kramer, liberated from the confines of the establishment, or marginalized from it, is able to speak truth to power, the id to Fauci’s superego.

So, the year is 2026. A few years ago, Fauci returned to the public eye, leading the US government’s efforts to combat the COVID pandemic. He has since been antagonized by Donald Trump and his followers; one assumes that Fauci and Trump do not, deep down, love each other. Kramer has been dead for six years, succumbing, in 2020, not to COVID, nor HIV, with which he had been diagnosed in 1988, but to pneumonia. The difference between the government’s responses to COVID and HIV/AIDS is staggering. A COVID vaccine was developed at lightning speed; between that and the ready availability of PrEP, we are living in something close to the world Kramer insisted was possible.

At the performance of Kramer/Fauci I attended, at FringeArts, I inquired whether a printed program was available. An usher informed me that programs would be handed out after the performance, a tribute to Kramer who insisted on distributing literature after an action, not before. The program I finally received contains a glossary covering government officials, activist groups, and pharmaceuticals, inviting the audience to enter into this conversation, which is still ongoing. Science and passion are ultimately not in opposition. Both, it turns out, are rooted in love.