Foam Rising, Kramer/Fauci Replays the 1993 AIDS Clash in DUMBO

At 45 Water Street in DUMBO, the floor starts empty and ends in foam.

That is the arc of *Kramer/Fauci*, Daniel Fish's one-hour, no-intermission piece at St. Ann's Warehouse. The words are not invented. They come from a C-SPAN interview recorded on November 30, 1993, when the playwright and activist Larry Kramer and Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the nation's leading AIDS researcher, argued on air about what was being done.

The run closes Saturday, October 24. Two Fridays remain, and each one ends with a conversation after the show.

Two Men and a Bare Floor

Will Brill plays Fauci. Thomas Jay Ryan plays Kramer. Greig Sargeant is the moderator, and Jennifer Seastone voices the callers from the public.

The script is the transcript. TheaterMania's Dan Rubins calls the show a word-for-word restaging of 53 minutes of that broadcast. It premiered at NYU Skirball this February. Performances at St. Ann's began September 27, and Playbill reports the official opening came on October 4.

The staging is anything but literal. David Finkle of New York Stage Review writes that Fish gives the two men a gymnasium-sized room with almost nothing in it. The only furnishing is a back wall of 80 bright lights that the lighting designer Scott Zielinski dims and sometimes cuts. Rubins describes the men starting at opposite corners of a wide void.

Then a tall machine rolls on. Finkle says it is fabric-hung and statue-like, and it begins spewing foamy bubbles. Within a few minutes they spread into a fan-shaped lake.

Rubins describes a stretch in which the foam rises waist-high across a third of the stage while Kramer sits on a desk chair in the middle of it.

What it means is left open. Finkle offers one reading, that the bubbles stand for individual AIDS deaths. Rubins saw the plague itself, growing while Kramer cannot stop it. Stephen Kearley of The BroadGAYS watched the foam keep gathering around the actors as the talk went on, a crisis spreading while people debate the response. Late in the hour, Finkle writes, Ryan grabs a broom and sweeps at foam that is still coming.

Not everything is solemn. Seastone, according to Rubins, performs much of the show on roller blades. She later turns up in an inflatable chicken suit, which left him, in his words, totally at sea.

Friends in a Fight

The argument still lands. Finkle notes that Fauci keeps saying "epidemic" while Kramer keeps pushing back on the word. In Rubins's account, Kramer demands to know why everybody is being so polite, then says it plainly.

We're in the middle of a plague.

The two were never simply enemies. The St. Ann's page quotes Kramer telling The New Yorker in 2002 that Fauci had been, as far as he was concerned, "the central focus of evil in the world." It also quotes Fauci on PBS in 2020, recalling the public attacks and then the turn. "It turned out I loved the guy, and I think he loved me back." On stage, Finkle and Kearley both catch Fauci answering Kramer with "I love you, Larry."

What the Critics Said

The reviews lean warm, with caveats. Finkle gave it four of five stars and found the encounter compelling, though he notes that no memorable resolutions are reached.

Kearley also gave it four stars and called it "Furious, funny theater about the cost of looking away." He praises Ryan's sharp, sarcastic Kramer and a Brill who plays Fauci as a doctor explaining what research can and cannot deliver.

Helen Shaw of The New Yorker, as quoted in BroadwayWorld's review roundup, calls the play "piercingly relevant." Thom Geier of Culture Sauce describes a blend of verbatim theater and theater of the absurd. Not everyone was won over. Stuart Miller of Theater Pizzazz wrote that the best twenty minutes would have been plenty.

Jonathan Mandell of New York Theater offered the most useful caveat. He credits Fish with a useful historical perspective, but says much of the specific conversation is now out of date, because protease inhibitors changed AIDS treatment a little over two years later. He wished the program carried a note to say so.

What to Know Before You Go

*Kramer/Fauci* plays at St. Ann's Warehouse, 45 Water Street, Brooklyn, through October 24. It runs one hour with no intermission. St. Ann's recommends it for ages 13 and up, and no one under 5 is admitted.

Both Friday talkbacks are listed on the St. Ann's page. On October 16, Steve Scully, who moderated the 1993 broadcast, talks with the former ABC reporter and anchor Brian Ross after the performance. On October 23, Fish talks with the novelist and critic Lynne Tillman.

Reviews list tickets starting at $59. Check St. Ann's for current prices and times. For another short Off-Broadway run that ends this month, see our story on Andrew Scott in Sea Wall.

By October 24 the foam will be gone. The argument, thirty-three years on, may not be.