Anthony Fauci makes acting debut in Oedipus the King play reading in DC | Anthony Fauci

When Anthony Fauci put on a pair of sunglasses, the room erupted in cheers and applause. “Ah, how terrible it is to know when, in the end, knowing doesn’t do you any good,” Fauci said. “I knew it once, but I must have forgotten it somehow, otherwise I never would have come.”

At 85, the scientist, doctor and civil servant who became famous during the Covid-19 pandemic was making his debut as an actor. Fauci played Tiresias, the blind prophet (hence the sunglasses), in a dramatic reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex at Georgetown University in Washington on Tuesday evening.

He was joined by a cast of professional actors led by Hollywood star Jesse Eisenberg as Oedipus, as well as Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, in a unique take on the Greek tragedy by Theater of War, a company that combines dramatic readings with town hall-style discussions in venues ranging from prisons to the Pentagon.

The company had come to argue that a 2,500-year-old play about a mythical king of Thebes who inadvertently murders his father and marries his mother could teach Washington something about the climate crisis. After all, Oedipus the King is a story of prophecy deniers, arrogant rulers, intergenerational curses, and a city ravaged by plague and ecological collapse.

In an interview before the show, Fauci, a classics (Greek and Latin) major at the College of the Holy Cross, told the Guardian: “The point of something that was potentially as horrific as realizing that you killed your father, slept with your mother and fathered your own siblings, is that he goes on and on, learning more and more about it, and he can’t believe it when it’s so obvious right in front of him.”

“Then he brings in the messenger and the shepherd and others and, by the time you realize it’s the truth, the only thing that happens is the woman kills herself and he blinds himself and then ends up dying. When you see something that is potentially as destructive as climate change, it’s right in front of you, you see it, and then there’s this constant denial about it. An unusual way of putting it in the context of a Greek tragedy, but it works.”

When asked to compare the play’s themes to the current political environment or Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, Fauci, former chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, laughed and politely declined. “I’m in enough trouble,” he smiles, emphasizing his preference to stay “under the radar” while continuing to teach medical residents and interns.

Eisenberg, star of films such as The Social Network, Zombieland and Now You See Me, described the play as a timeless philosophical argument made flesh. “Here you have a guy who is in denial about his own destiny and slowly accepting it and so, for me as an actor, it creates wonderful dramatic stakes, but intellectually it’s also a fascinating discussion about denial and destiny and, particularly here, blind leadership.”

He says of Oedipus: “He doesn’t listen to reason, he ignores evidence, and he demonizes anyone who tries to contradict what he assumes and what he thinks. The thing about doing it with Dr. Fauci, of course, is that it comes with all kinds of other resonances that can be quite powerful allegorically.”

Co-founded in 2009 by Bryan Doerries and Phyllis Kaufman, Theater of War Productions deployed ancient dramas to confront myriad modern traumas. He performed Ajax for military veterans to discuss PTSD and suicide, The Suppliants for an audience discussing the plight of Ukrainian refugees, and Antigone in Ferguson to combat racialized police violence.

But on Tuesday, the focus was on the survival of the entire planet. The Oedipus Project, originally developed during the global Covid-19 pandemic lockdown to discuss public health and isolated trauma, has been reframed for Washington Climate Week.

Doerries, the company’s artistic director, said: “At the center of this play is a fundamental question: Is it possible for us to wake up before it is too late and make a change, not just for ourselves, but for generations to come. The play depicts the human capacity for denial as seemingly limitless and our worst quality as a species.”

He added: “We don’t do this to make people wallow fatalistically in the impossibility of making change. The reason we make Greek tragedies about people who learn too late is largely the same reason it was done in the ancient world, not to send people home to wallow in their relative lack of action, but to wake them up to the fleeting and very narrow possibility of change before it’s too late.”

Fauci, who spent decades as a prophet of science warning US administrations about the realities of infectious disease, was – to borrow a Trumpian phrase – straight from central casting for this particular metaphor.

Doerries commented: “We’re leaning into the meta-theatricality of that, the double valence. He’s playing Tiresias but he’s saying Tiresias’ lines with one foot planted in his world and one foot in the ancient, archaic, classical past..

“One of the most exciting aspects of the scene is that he can actually scold Oedipus and I’ve never seen Tony scold anyone.. The note I gave him during rehearsal was that this was perhaps the only time in your professional career where you could actually scold the king in the way you always wanted to..”

The 75-minute reading took place in the ornate setting of the university’s Gaston Hall, featuring an ornate wooden ceiling and classic allegorical scenes on its walls, before an audience of 700 students, academics, climate activists and policymakers, and other online spectators.

Once the actors finished, they took their places among the audience and Doerries stepped forward to facilitate, asking questions of the room and the global Zoom audience: “Despite the cultural and temporal distance, what spoke to you tonight as you listened to these intrepid artists and public servants read the words of Sophocles? What moved you? What resonated with you? What was true?”»

The responses were immediate, raw and thoughtful. Megan Blue, an undergraduate studying environmental sustainability at Georgetown, drew a direct line between Oedipus’s treatment of Tiresias and the modern treatment of climate scientists.

She told the assembly: “I feel like that’s so reflective of what we’re seeing with climate denial and the way that a lot of people are pushing back and challenging experts and scientists and scientific facts, because the reality of the climate crisis is that we need this fundamental shift in the ways we are and the values ​​that underpin our system..

Michaela Harrison, a Georgetown graduate, said the line that stuck with her was: “What is wrong with you, you miserable men?” There were shouts of agreement throughout the auditorium. She commented: “We have so many people right now who are close to the most powerful but are so afraid to tell the truth, are so afraid to stand on the truth and trust in the power of telling the truth. »

Joining via Zoom from New Orleans, Nathaniel Rich, a novelist and environmental scholar, highlighted citizens’ desperate need to find a scapegoat. While it’s easy to blame oil and gas executives or denialist political parties, Rich said, climate change leaves everyone with a “sickening feeling” of complicity. “We cannot escape our participation in the problem, no matter how virtuous we are. »

A spectator on the balcony warned that the planet is heading toward a worst-case scenario, but humans have the power to stop it. He said: “I believe the answer is that we tell the truth and we listen to those who deny it. In the last election, more than half of the people who voted elected Donald Trump in the general vote. They have a point of view, they have a position and we have to learn where they are coming from and we tell them the truth so they can listen to us.”

But Doerries kept a thread of hope throughout the evening. The last word went to a freshman who said, “I don’t think what happened to Oedipus was inevitable,” he said firmly. “We are Oedipus before the miserable ending, before the disgrace. The end of the Oedipus story is a potential bad ending and we are not there yet. We have a chance to fight for a better ending, to listen to those who tell the truth.”