On Monday evening at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, anyone entering Room 101 would step directly into March 13, 1989.
Thirty-six years ago, the AIDS activist group Act Up New York had the space that night for its weekly meeting — an event that David Wise’s immersive theater experiment “Fight Back” seeks to recreate.
Audience members are by definition participants, too. Each has been assigned the persona of someone who was involved with the organization early on. Act Up was in emergency mode then, trying desperately to get the culture to treat the catastrophic epidemic with greater urgency.
Just days before the meeting, AIDS had killed Robert Mapplethorpe at 42. Within a year, it would claim Alvin Ailey at 58, Keith Haring at 31 and many thousands more. For the people in the room, death had become a far too frequent part of life.
That is the cauldron in which the real meeting took place, and into which “Fight Back” means to drop its audience, as an exercise in empathy. As Wise, 47, explained by phone, he doesn’t expect people in 2025 to be able to access the breadth of emotions the activists felt in 1989.
“But I do think that there’s something about inhabiting with your body,” he said, “and doing the actions that someone was doing, and saying the words that someone might have been saying, that is really effective, and affecting.”
Wise supplies detailed biographical research to help make sense of persona assignments. Still, the show’s improvisational nature can make it a little surreal for participants — like being in a dream where you recognize no one but they recognize you.
“Karen!” a woman I’d never seen before squealed just before the meeting started, and threw her arms around me. “Do you remember me from last week’s meeting?”
My assigned persona was Karen Ramspacher, a 24-year-old straight white woman, and my name tag had her name on it. The effusive stranger’s own name tag told me she was Maria Maggenti, a fellow member of the Act Up women’s caucus.
“Guys,” Maria yelled to the rest of the caucus, “it’s Karen, our heterosexual!” Then, to me: “I was speaking of you as if you were the yeti. Sorry. But you’re real!”
The meeting, lasting the two-plus hours that it took to get through the agenda, was remarkably real-seeming as well — a potent reminder that behind the fiery advocacy of Act Up (an acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was an admirably nerdy commitment to a rigorously democratic process: show-of-hands voting, pointed debate.
Wise was at the front of the room in the quiet role of Jason Heffner, the group’s administrator, but “Fight Back” has no cast in the conventional sense. Which does not necessarily mean zero actor participants. When the agenda turned to a protest trip to Albany, up popped Arian Moayed, as Richard Elovich, to sort out details.
The meeting’s main focus is preparation for an action against City Hall, so one agenda item is civil disobedience training: going limp, letting the police drag you away. There is also a poster up for approval, depicting Mayor Ed Koch next to a message ending with his catchphrase: “10,000 New York City AIDS Deaths. How’m I Doin’?”
This week’s performance of “Fight Back,” with 50-some people attending — fewer than would have been at the real meeting — was its third; the first was in March 2024. All have been performed in Room 101, a sleeker space now than it was 36 years ago. So far, Wise has asked Act Up members who were active back then not to attend because he is still refining the piece. But he plans to invite some when he does it again on Aug. 18.
A multidisciplinary artist specializing in the immersive, interactive and historically inspired, Wise found the catalyst for “Fight Back” in Sarah Schulman’s 2021 book, “Let the Record Show,” a history of Act Up, whose founders included the playwright Larry Kramer. That in turn led Wise to the Act Up Oral History Project, whose 187 interviews he watched. He also read all of the minutes of Act Up meetings from the organization’s start in 1987 through 1989.
The March 13, 1989, meeting appealed to him because it occurred in the lead-up to a major action, and because the minutes were “particularly good,” he said. So while it isn’t a transcript, “I really know who said what and what everyone talked about in very good detail.”
Wise was 11, growing up in suburban Connecticut, when the real meeting took place. He remembers hearing about Act Up and feeling put off by the group, because it was not well behaved; he thought there must be better, more proper ways to pursue the same goals.
“Now,” he said, “I think exactly the opposite.”
It’s not that he idealizes those early activists, though. “Fight Back” is not an attempt at hagiography.
“Act Up was full of real people with foibles,” Wise said. “But they did something heroic, and I just fell in love with them.”
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