New play looking at friendship between AIDS activist Larry Kramer and Anthony Fauci in the works

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NEW YORK (AP) — A new play exploring the complex relationship between playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime top U.S. infectious disease expert, will make its premiere early next year in New York under the direction of 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 play The Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts between Feb. 11-21, The AP has learned.

Fish, whose 2019 production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” won the Tony Award for best musical revival, is using the transcript of a 1993 C-Span face-off between the two men as the text of the play, which included call-ins from across the country.

“I’m looking at a particular moment in time, at a particular exchange that has resonances into their relationship, has resonances into the politics and culture of the time, and seeing what happens when we do that now. That’s really where I’m coming from,” said Fish.

Kramer and Fauci went from adversaries to friends as they confronted the AIDS crisis from different sides in the 1980s and ’90s. Kramer, who wrote “The Normal Heart” and founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, 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 would became a lightning rod again as leader of the national response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

The exchange in 1993 was heated and illuminating, with Kramer acknowledging their complex relationship: “He is a man, an ordinary man, who is being asked to play God,” Kramer said at the time. “And he is being punished because he cannot be God. And that is a terrible position to be in.”

After Kramer’s death in 2020, Fish stumbled across the C-Span exchange. “I just thought it was really compelling and it kind of just stayed with me,” he said. “And after a while I thought, ‘I wonder what would happen if we made a performance out of this?’”

Fish doesn’t want to mount a literal recreation of the exchange, instead reaching for something more theatrical. In 1993, Kramer was beamed in from New York while Fauci was in the C-Span studio in Washington, D.C. For the play, Fish will put the two — plus the moderator — in the same room on stage.

“There’s a moment where Kramer at one point says, ‘You know, I love Tony Fauci,’ and later on he says, ‘Tony, when you talk like that, I hate you.’ And Fauci says, ‘I know you do, Larry.’”