NEW YORK — A new play exploring the complex relationship between a playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer And Dr. Anthony Fauci, Longtime a leading U.S. expert on infectious diseases, the film will premiere early next year in New York, directed by Tony Award winner Daniel Fish.
“Kramer/Fauci” will star Tony winner Will Brill from “Stereophonic” and Thomas Jay Ryan, who starred in the film Henry Fool. It will be held at the Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts from Feb. 11 to 21, the AP has learned.
Fish, whose production of Oklahoma! Rodgers and Hammerstein in 2019! winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival, uses the transcript of a 1993 C-Span fight between the two men as the text of the play, which included call-ins from around the country.
“I look at a specific moment in time, a specific exchange that has resonance in their relationship, has resonance in the politics and culture of that time, and see what happens when we do it now. That's really where I come from,” Fish said.
Cramer and Fauci went from adversaries to friends as they faced the AIDS crisis from different angles in the 1980s and '90s. Kramer, who wrote The Normal Heart and founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash the Power, or ACT demanded the government do more and faster for those with symptoms.
Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, insisted on a pragmatic approach. He will once again become a lightning rod as the leader of the national response to coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
The conversation in 1993 was heated and enlightening, as Kramer acknowledged their complicated relationship: “He's a man, an ordinary man, being asked to play God,” Kramer said at the time. “And he's being punished because he can't be God. And it's a terrible situation.”
After Cramer's death in 2020, Fish stumbled upon the C-Span exchange. “I just thought it was really exciting and it kind of stayed with me,” he said. “And after a while I thought, 'I wonder what would happen if we made a play out of this?'”
Fish doesn't want to recreate the dialogue in a literal sense, instead going for something more theatrical. In 1993, Cramer was teleported from New York while Fauci was in a C-Span studio in Washington, DC. For the play, Phish will place the two—plus the host—in one room on stage.
“There's a point where Kramer at one point says, 'You know, I love Tony Fauci,' and later says, 'Tony, when you say that, I hate you.' And Fauci says, “I know, Larry.”
