Kramer/Fauci

Kramer/Fauci is a one-hour play at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, built from a single live television broadcast. On November 30, 1993, the cable network C-SPAN recorded a call-in program in which the playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who headed the federal research institute NIAID, took questions and comments from viewers across the country. The play restages that whole conversation.

Daniel Fish conceived and directed the piece. There is no separate playwright, because every spoken line comes from the broadcast transcript. St. Ann's Warehouse presents the show in association with OHenry Productions and LD Entertainment as a limited engagement. It is a new work: NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts commissioned and developed it and gave it a world premiere in February 2026.

Kramer wrote The Normal Heart, which opened at The Public Theater in 1985, co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis and founded ACT UP in 1987. Fauci led NIAID from 1984 to 2022. The two began as adversaries and, over the course of the AIDS crisis, became friends.

Kramer joined the live program from New York, while Fauci sat in a Washington, D.C., studio and a moderator steered the hour. It aired just after the Clinton administration announced a task force on AIDS research and drug development, and that announcement frames the debate. Kramer saw the new group as one more delay. By then about 200,000 people in the United States had died of the disease, and the first major treatment breakthrough, highly active antiretroviral therapy, was still three years away.

Kramer insists that officials already know why AIDS drugs are slow to arrive: red tape, the rules Congress sets and too little urgency. Kramer presses Fauci to take command and invoke emergency powers. Fauci replies that the science is hard and steady progress is under way. He declines to publicly turn on the lawmakers who fund his institute's work, and he will not waive the established rules for drug trials. They also clash over projections of future infections. Kramer wants the highest estimate used, while Fauci would rather not overstate what is known, fearing it would cost him credibility.

Between their exchanges come the callers, who bring questions, personal grief, misinformation and prejudice. One caller suggests that people with HIV be quarantined; Fauci rejects the idea. The argument is sharp but affectionate: in the same hour, Kramer calls Fauci a coward and tells him he loves him. The tone shifts between tense debate and dark comedy.

Kramer/Fauci is documentary verbatim theater. The script is the C-SPAN transcript, performed word for word, and the production takes no liberties with what is said. It runs in real time, about an hour like the original broadcast, and stops where the broadcast stopped.

The text is based on a program produced by the National Cable Satellite Corporation (C-SPAN) and is used by permission, as are Kramer's words, with the consent of his estate. The Moderator character is based on Steve Scully, the journalist who hosted the 1993 program. The callers are viewers from around the country, and one actor plays all of them.

Fish did not want a literal re-creation. In 1993 the two men were in different cities; on stage, Kramer, Fauci and the Moderator share one room. The actors are not made up to look like the real people, because Fish wanted the piece to feel contemporary rather than period. They move freely around the space instead of sitting at a television desk, and Kramer often confronts the others at close range.

The large stage is left almost bare, with a back wall of big spotlights aimed at the audience. Midway through, a machine fills part of the stage with soap foam during a long silent sequence while Kramer sits in a chair, and later he clears it away with a squeegee. The actor playing the callers spends much of the show on rollerblades and later appears in an inflatable chicken suit. Fish leaves any echoes of the present day to the audience and declined to comment on them.

Fish came across the C-SPAN program after Kramer died on May 27, 2020, while reading obituaries and an article written by Fauci. He had also seen the original production of The Normal Heart when he was very young and counts it among the most powerful nights he has had in a theater.

NYU Skirball commissioned, developed and first presented the play. The world premiere began on February 11, 2026, and ran through February 21; its producing partners were The Collapsable Giraffe and OHenry Productions. From September 8 to 11, 2026, the play gave four performances at FringeArts in Philadelphia as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Pete Simpson played Fauci there; the other three roles were played by the same actors as in New York.

St. Ann's Warehouse announced the play as part of its fall 2026 season on June 24, 2026. Previews at St. Ann's began on September 27, 2026.