The Play ‘Fauci & Kramer’ Offers a Lesson That Relates to COVID-19 and Beyond

by Greg Ehrhardt

With Anthony Fauci once again appearing before Congress and sparring with Senator Rand Paul and the entire Republican Senate over the legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is worth revisiting one of the more overlooked theatrical works of recent years: Fauci & Kramer.

First produced in 2024, Fauci & Kramer dramatizes the contentious relationship between Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime expert on Infectious Diseases, and playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer.

Set primarily during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, the play follows two men who desperately wanted to save lives but fundamentally disagreed about how to do it.

Kramer, founder of ACT UP and author of The Normal Heart, viewed the government's response to AIDS as painfully slow while thousands of Americans died. He publicly attacked Fauci and other health officials, accusing them of failing to appreciate the urgency of the crisis.

Fauci, meanwhile, tried to balance that urgency with patience. He understood patients' desperation but believed that treatments still had to be tested, data had to be gathered, and medicine could not abandon scientific standards simply because the crisis demanded immediate answers.

These two men did not like each other, in real life or on stage, but what begins as open hostility gradually evolves into something far more illuminating: mutual respect.

Boy, is that something we could use more of in today’s politics and culture.

The play doesn't suggest either person was right, and there are no hero/villain designations. Instead, it argues that each man ultimately made the other better and, overall, strengthened the discourse surrounding the subject. Kramer forced Fauci and the medical establishment to move faster. Fauci helped ensure that the race for treatment remained grounded in rigorous science rather than wishful thinking.

By the end, Fauci & Kramer becomes a story about the uneasy partnership between activism and expertise. It argues that real progress often comes not when one side defeats the other, but when passionate advocates and careful scientists challenge each other toward the same goal.

And that brings us to the world we live in today, where we argue over public policy messaging surrounding COVID-19, masks, and isolation/quarantining.

(And if we could, let’s take a deep breath).

There may not be a more polarizing issue, even 6 years since the pandemic started. People have wildly strong opinions on either side, and there’s a lot of name-calling. People are dug in.

But whatever one thinks about the exchanges between Anthony Fauci and Senator Rand Paul, they represent a different version of the same conflict.

Paul has consistently questioned Fauci's decisions regarding masking and quarantining and argued that public officials deserve intense accountability. Fauci defended his decisions by pointing to the scientific evidence available at the time, which mostly relied on what we thought we knew about managing the influenza pandemic in 1918.

Supporters of Fauci frequently portray Paul 9and others with a similar mindset) as simply attacking science.

Supporters of Paul often portray Fauci as someone who believed he should never be questioned, and Fauci’s own diaries admittedly seem to confirm his swollen ego.

Reality is almost always more complicated.

Public officials absolutely should face tough oversight. Democracies depend on it, and the history of science shows what people assume to be scientific fact often evolves.

Scientists are expected to revise conclusions as better evidence emerges. That is how the scientific process works.

The challenge is finding a way to ask difficult questions without assuming bad faith and to defend expertise without treating it as infallible.

That is exactly the tension Fauci & Kramer explores. The conclusion it reaches is that humility about what we know and don’t know (and what we knew and didn’t know at the time) would do wonders for discourse.

Kramer/Fauci (which is more of a documentary-style stage play of the famous C-SPAN debate between Fauci and Kramer) is playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse starting September 27th, 2026. Everyone in the New York area should visit or revisit this; it’s timelier than ever.