Frontmezzjunkies reports: Daniel Fish turns a furious 1993 AIDS debate into an urgent theatrical confrontation at St. Ann’s Warehouse.
The words HIV/AIDS crisis carry a weight for me that decades of distance have done little to ease, making my experience of Kramer/Fauci at St. Ann’s Warehouse intensely personal. Conceived and directed by Daniel Fish and produced by OHenry Productions, this uninterrupted, one-hour production reconstructs a fiery 1993 C-SPAN call-in debate between AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer, played by Thomas Jay Ryan, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, played by Will Brill. Four performers make their way onto the expansive stage, one rolling in on a chair, and another, Jennifer Seastone, glides in on rollerblades. It’s a stark yet dynamic playing field, setting the scene for a confrontation whose tension is hypnotic and electrifying. Every word comes from the original broadcast transcript, yet the debate feels astonishingly immediate.
The battle begins with Kramer’s demand for action. “We can’t afford four more years of lip service,” he insists, railing against “forming a task force that won’t get going for years!” Fauci counters that he does not believe it will be lip service and asks for faith and patience in the process. Their exchange reveals two sharp minds, both acutely aware of the stakes, whose years of disagreement have not erased their genuine affection for one another. Kramer wants emergency measures, immediate solutions, and an end to political delay. Fauci, a brilliant doctor committed to finding a solution, speaks from inside the complicated machinery of government, where task forces and negotiations can consume precious time.
Kramer’s single word, “Urgency!” lands with the force of an alarm. Ryan (OHenry Productions’ Uncle Vanya) captures Kramer’s volcanic impatience with remarkable conviction. His lines arrive with such passion that I kept wanting to add exclamation points. His quieter moments, though, can be even more devastating, allowing the exhaustion and grief beneath the anger to surface. Brill (Broadway’s Stereophonic) spectacularly gives Fauci a different kind of intensity, conveying the frustration of a man trying to move a bureaucratic process forward while facing an activist who refuses to accept delay as an answer. Their exchanges are full of both irritation and affection. Fauci’s “I love ya, Larry” feels authentic, yet it is met by the persistent demand to know where the action is, with the underlying warmth between them making their disagreement even more affecting.
Fish (Broadway’s Oklahoma!) keeps the audience inside this uncomfortable encounter through staging that refuses to let us settle into passive observation. A vast bank of stadium-like lights, designed by Scott Zielinski, shines directly into the audience, making the room itself part of the confrontation and refusing to let us comfortably look away or tune out what is at stake here. The wide-open stage, designed by Jim Findlay, Joshua Higgason, and Amy Rubin, gives Kramer and Fauci room to occupy opposite sides of the argument, leaving every gesture and pause exposed. Greig Sargeant (Elevator Repair Service’s Measure for Measure) provides a steady presence as C-SPAN moderator Steve Scully, keeping the televised debate moving as Kramer and Fauci press their positions.
Seastone plays the callers who enter the discussion from across the country, giving each voice its own temperature and character as she navigates the stage on rollerblades and in an inflatable costume. When she rolls up to Kramer and gently touches his shoulder, blessing him for telling the truth after so many negative calls, she breaks me wide open. I have spent decades trying to put myself back together after losing so many people to this disease, and that brief expression of recognition reaches straight through those years. And even when the production’s choices are deliberately eccentric, Seastone (Minor Theater’s Pathetic) makes these moments feel entirely earned. Terese Wadden’s costumes help Seastone give each caller a distinct character, with the chicken suit introducing a burst of absurdity that sits strangely, and effectively, alongside the gravity of the subject. I’m not sure I fully understood the choice intellectually, but the collision of absurdity and the gravity of the subject worked its way inside me.
Then the bubbles begin to spread. A machine floods the stage with foam, creating a surreal and painfully legible image. Under the blazing backlight, the suds accumulate around Kramer until he is almost buried beneath them. The foam moves outward, indifferent to whatever lies in its path, evoking the relentless spread of AIDS and the difficulty of containing its devastation. Fauci walks through the mess, registering the crisis through a different set of instincts, while Kramer eventually takes hold of equipment and tries to clean it up. His effort matters, but the scale of the mess makes its limits impossible to ignore. How can anyone stop a catastrophe that has already spread so far? The numbers in the debate are sometimes stretched and exaggerated, a tactic Kramer openly embraces to force political attention toward the scale of the emergency. That admission complicates Ryan’s portrayal, grounding Kramer’s anger in real loss and an urgent demand for action while exposing the methods he uses to make himself heard.
The production’s power lies in its refusal to make either man a simple hero or villain. Ryan’s Kramer is fiercely demanding, emotionally exposed, and unwilling to let official language conceal the human cost of delay. Brill’s Fauci is diplomatic and sometimes maddeningly measured, yet his affection for Kramer and his determination to find a path forward remain visible beneath the bureaucratic language. Their relationship is the heart of the piece: two men with profoundly different approaches, bound together by the same crisis and by a mutual regard that survives their clashes. Tei Blow’s sound design, built around the original C-SPAN audio heard through the performers’ earpieces, keeps the production tethered to the rhythm and texture of the actual exchange. The actors follow the broadcast as they perform, giving the verbatim form a precision that makes the confrontation feel immediate.
Kramer/Fauci runs at St. Ann’s Warehouse through October 24, 2026. The one-hour production plays without an intermission, keeping the audience close to the urgency of the debate. I spent five years living in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, and I remember the weekly funerals and memorials, far too many for anyone in their twenties to endure. That history is part of why Kramer’s insistence on being heard cuts so deeply. His wish to have “Whatever happened to AIDS” written on his gravestone is a heartbreaking expression, one that resonates, reminding me about the lives lost behind those words, and about the urgency of making people listen while there is still time to act.