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There’s immersive theater, and then there’s Fight Back, which dispenses with the idea of spectators entirely. Returning to New York on May 4, May 11 and May 18, the experience drops participants directly into a pivotal moment in activist history: a March 13, 1989, meeting of ACT UP, the grassroots group that reshaped the national response to the AIDS crisis.
Created by David Wise, the setup is powerful. Instead of watching the story unfold, attendees are assigned the persona of a real person who attended that meeting, complete with a biographical profile and guidance on how to engage. (Yes, including Larry Kramer.) There are no actors to guide the emotional temperature, just a room filled with strangers tasked with embodying activists at a time when urgency, grief and anger were colliding in real time. And indeed, the action takes place in the very same room as the real-life meeting did almost 40 years ago.
Some attendees can choose to take on additional responsibilities—facilitators, agitators, organizers—mirroring the internal dynamics that made ACT UP both effective and fractious. The structure leans into that tension. You’re not just learning about history; you’re asked to participate in it, to make decisions, to speak (or not), to feel the pressure of collective action unfolding without a script.
It’s a bold premise, but also a pointed one. ACT UP meetings were messy, emotional and often contentious spaces. By recreating that environment, Fight Back resists the retrospective neatness that can flatten activist movements into tidy narratives. Instead, it foregrounds the uncertainty and urgency that defined them.
There’s also an ethical tightrope in turning real people—many of whom were fighting for their lives—into roles that participants “play.” But the project carefully and thoughtfully pairs attendees with a persona based on a questionnaire, transforming it from a gimmick into literally stepping into someone else's shoes and watching history unfold in real time as an active participant.
Immersive theater has long been blurring the line between audience and participant, but Fight Back pushes that idea into even more charged territory, making the evening less about escapism than confrontation. And maybe that’s the point. You don’t leave with the comfort of having “seen” something. You leave having been in the room, however briefly, and facing the impossible question that defined it: What do we do now?
Fight Back will be held at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center (208 W 13th St). For more information and to purchase tickets, click here.