Fauci and Kramer

FAUCI and KRAMER

By Drew Fornarola

Directed by Kate Powers

First Look Buffalo, Canturbury Woods Performing Arts Center

Buffalo, NY

March 17, 2023

Reviewed by Janet Werther

What do you want? Why are you here? These questions drive the dramatic action in Drew Fornarola’s play FAUCI and KRAMER. In the play, Fornarola imagines the variously bombastic and heartfelt (but always witty) repartee that would inevitably ensue if playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer returned to haunt his longtime public foe/dear friend, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Set shortly after Kramer’s death in May 2020, Fornarola’s play is part ghost story, part memory play, and part historical docudrama. Indeed, the dramaturgical instability produced by crisscrossing these always-already permeable generic boundaries is key to the play’s affective charm.

FAUCI and KRAMER received its world premiere in early 2023. It was produced by First Look Buffalo, a Western New York theatre company dedicated to developing new works by regionally affiliated playwrights. The play’s discursive focus is Fauci and Kramer’s shared history of the early HIV/AIDS pandemic, but the anxiety and isolation of the early COVID-19 pandemic are its backdrop and setting. Sarah Waechter’s simple yet elegant set design captured pandemic sensibilities by dangling an assortment of face masks from Dr. Fauci’s computer screen and placing a canister of Clorox wipes and a partly used container of bright green hand sanitizer on prominent display. Kate Powers’s direction further reinforced the climate of pre-vaccine precarity. Before Fauci returned from a brief retreat to the restroom, for example, he mumble-sang “Happy Birthday” from offstage, a practice familiar, if now defunct, from a time in the early pandemic when many of us believed (or at least wished) we could ward off the virus simply by washing our hands for twenty tuneful seconds at a time.

Beloved local actors Steve Jakiel and Louis Colaiacovo played Fauci and Kramer, respectively, to emotionally resonant if not always visually precise effect. This is not to suggest that FAUCI and KRAMER—in its script or costume design—failed to evoke the real men whose public images bear the weight of the play’s philosophical concerns. Colaiacovo certainly resembled Kramer in denim overalls, a chunky sweater, necklace, and small, red glasses. A full, barely graying beard and clean-shaven scalp completed the visual transformation. Unlike Dr. Anthony Fauci, however, Jakiel is a large man. Towering over his scene partner, Jakiel looked quite dissimilar to “America’s Doctor,” though attired in a suit befitting his prestigious station and professional public demeanor. This dissimilarity was acknowledged in the play’s first moments in a direct address to the audience, then mostly ignored. Verisimilitude is less important here than the affective weight of evocation, achieved through Fornarola’s words and the actors’ attention to movement, pacing, and the tensile force of their respective deliveries.

Colaiacovo brought a bounding, enthusiastic energy to bear on his performance as Kramer, explained as the privileged agency of the dearly departed: as a ghost, Kramer has chosen to return in his prime. He remains frustrated at inequities and indignities big and small, yet Kramer’s characteristic anger was tempered in performance by good-humored annoyance at the pitiful excuse for a cup of coffee provided by Fauci’s Keurig machine. Colaiacovo’s lightly comic performance of this coffee lazzo—wanting a cup of coffee, balking at the travesty of the Keurig and Fauci’s K-cup options, considering a trip to buy better coffee, reassuring his friend that a ghost cannot get COVID at the corner store, considering that perhaps a ghost cannot buy coffee, either, brewing a K-cup, bemoaning its quality, and so forth—cast the irascible activist as crotchety but relatably human.

Jakiel’s Dr. Fauci, meanwhile, remained calm and relatively unfazed in the face of frustration and uncertainty. Yet unlike Kramer’s spry ghost, he was clearly exhausted. Kramer has descended (or perhaps ascended, as the pair joke) to Fauci’s living room as the doctor labors through another sleepless night during another once-in-a-lifetime pandemic brought on by another novel and capricious virus. Kramer’s presence and the specter of HIV were, in this context, reminders of how much can be lost when medical bureaucracy acts sluggishly. Yet Fauci’s bombastic activist friend and compatriot is also a reminder of how much shared purpose and diverse tactics can accomplish, both within and outside established institutions.

As the play progressed, it became increasingly immaterial whether or not actors Jakiel and Colaiacovo realistically resembled their real-life counterparts. (In a personal interview I conducted, Fornarola intimated that he’d be interested in seeing future productions of FAUCI and KRAMER pursue expansive casting choices for both roles.) Homing in on big ideas about justice, collaboration, and living a meaningful life, the arguments between these iconic (and in Kramer’s case, iconoclastic) characters develop both in personal detail and in broad, ideological strokes while the men themselves became increasingly symbolic avatars. As Jakiel and Colaiacovo stood in for Fauci and Kramer, Fauci and Kramer began to stand in for a notion of shared purpose inflected by different personal styles and political approaches to collective action. This abstraction enabled Jakiel and Colaiacovo, hometown heroes of the Buffalo, NY regional theatre community, to engage local audiences directly and intimately in the play’s dialectics: Colaiacovo is youthfully middle-aged like Kramer’s ghost, whereas Jakiel is significantly older; Colaiacovo is openly queer, whereas Jakiel is the heterosexual father of some of Buffalo’s favorite homegrown local talent. Despite their differences, however, these men are brought together by shared purpose—mitigation of harmful illness and death for Fauci and Kramer, and the intersubjective work of the theatre for Jakiel and Colaiacovo. Explicitly inviting disparate local constituencies to share space in the theatre, FAUCI and KRAMER used political and activist history as a prism through which local theatre audiences could experience co-existence, compromise, and the complex intimacy of connection across difference.

When the play’s ghost first arrived, both men assume that Kramer has returned to teach Dr. Fauci some lesson. “This is no Christmas Carol,” however, Kramer quips. Rather, the drama’s emotional climax unfurled in relation to Kramer’s personal weaknesses in a moment of fraught ambivalence. As Kramer characteristically excoriated Fauci for the shortcomings of his pragmatic approach to public health, Fauci reminded Kramer of the perhaps hypocritical preferential treatment he once received for liver failure. Ethically, shouldn’t the organ transplant have gone to a younger, healthier individual? And someone without HIV?

By the end of the exchange, Kramer was stopped in his tracks. Standing at the edge of the stage, as if at a precipice, the loquacious rabblerouser was, finally, at a loss for words. Without turning to look at his scene partner, Kramer insisted that the liver was life or death. “I remember,” Fauci replied, gazing sympathetically at his all-too-human friend. After all, Dr. Fauci revealed, he was one of the doctors on Kramer’s team. The shock of this revelation, for unfamiliar audiences, is that Larry Kramer—the longtime agitator and self-styled beacon of principle—would stoop to individualism and self-preservation. As Kramer defended his individual right to survival, Fauci nodded silently along. Perhaps this is the play’s simple message: It is okay, even good, to survive.

A montage of video footage from the early days of the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out concluded the performance. This miracle of medical expediency would likely never have been achieved without the lessons learned from the early days of the still ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic. Still, as my lover and I re-lived the hope and relief of those early vaccine deployments from our seats in the audience, it was hard not to notice that she and I were the only attendees wearing face masks. What would Kramer really say, looking out at all those uncovered faces as COVID still rages? Wouldn’t he rail at us? Perhaps. What’s more important, however, is what we agree to expect—and accept—from one another. I hope that future productions will encourage local producers, collaborators, and audience members to ask themselves, clearly and directly: What do you want? Why are you here? For regional theatre to flourish, the local development of new works must encourage communities to ask ourselves what we collectively need from live performance now. Who are our unique constituencies, and how can the work we produce bring them together as a community, as FAUCI and KRAMER did, if only for the length of the show?