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Rick Miramontez / Kendall Edwards
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE
“FIGHT BACK”
THE IMMERSIVE THEATRICAL EXPERIMENT
CREATED BY DAVID WISE
RETURNS TO NEW YORK CITY
ON MARCH 19, 2026 AT 7:00PM
AT THE CENTER
SIGN UP NOW!
Photo by Hong-An Tran. To download photos, click here.
New York, NY (March 5, 2026) – Creator David Wise announced today that Fight Back, the immersive theatrical experience, will return to New York City with a one-night-only event on March 19, 2026 at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center (208 W 13th St). This will be the sixth presentation since the experiment’s inception in March 2024.
The premise of this theatrical experiment is simple: It’s the March 13, 1989 meeting of ACT UP New York, the passionate group taking direct action to fight AIDS. But – there are no actors and there’s no audience. When participants come to Fight Back, from the minute they arrive, they are a person attending the meeting.
Participants get a biographical profile of their persona and instructions for how to engage. Some (self-selected) people will also get details about specialized roles they’ll have at the meeting. Every persona will be an actual person who was at that meeting. When participants register for Fight Back, they will fill out a brief questionnaire so that they get matched with a persona that suits them.
“There’s a real hunger to revisit passionate, effective activism, and Fight Back does that in such an intimate way,” stated Wise. “When I first conceived of Fight Back, I really didn’t know if it could work. It’s so different, and it asks so much of people. I’ve loved seeing it work — wonderfully different every time, and I’m excited for more people to get to experience it, especially people who are nervous about participating or don’t think they’d be good at it. Because people really surprise themselves.”
For more information and to sign up, please visit www.fightback.nyc . A $19.89 donation is required for all participants.
To download press photos, click here. To download logo, click here.
The goal of Fight Back is to try to experience the amazing, complicated, life-changing emotions that the people at an ACT UP meeting in 1989 felt. For many ACT UPers, the weekly Monday night general meetings were central to their experience in ACT UP. Through these meetings, ACT UPers came to understand that their lives had worth — contrary to what they were being told by their families, their communities, and their government. During an unfathomably horrible time, they brought their anger, their shame, their defiance, their fear, their humor, their stubbornness, and their sexiness, and discovered that together they could use all of this to truly change the world and save their lives.
Fight Back explores whether there is something additional we can experience by attempting to inhabit the people who were actually there. Through trying to feel what they felt — by having our bodies enact their actions — can we come closer to experiencing what they experienced?
Fight Back is a proud recipient of a Support for Artist grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.
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