“As far as I was concerned, he was the central focus of evil in the world.” The accuser was Larry Kramer, playwright and activist. The accused was Anthony Fauci, a leading AIDS researcher in the 1990s. The remark appeared in The New Yorker in 2002, and harked back to a battle that had begun 14 years earlier, when Fauci, in the Village Voice, called out Kramer and the government for their inaction during the AIDS crisis. Over time, the relationship between Kramer and Fauci grew into a bond forged by their shared determination to end the epidemic. But in 1993, face-to-face on television, the two men erupted into one of the most tense debates of the health crisis. That confrontation is now the subject of a new play by Daniel Fish, where their simultaneous amity and contempt are laid bare. “I’m looking at a particular moment in time,” says Fish, “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.” —Jeanne Malle