Waging Nonviolence · 2 days ago

Time Traveling to a 1980s Act up Meeting Through Theater | Waging Nonviolence

In a room where ACT UP once gathered to fight for the lives of the dying, artist David Wise stages "Fight Back" - an immersive theater piece that asks strangers to stop scrolling, assume the identities of real 1989 activists, and work through an actual 26-item meeting agenda together. What unfolds is less a performance than a reckoning: with how organizing actually works, how slowly and unglamorously, and with what was lost and what was built in those years. The evening's quiet revelation comes after the bell rings, when the woman who had interjected most forcefully admits she had been there - a teenager answering phones for the only Philadelphia doctor willing to treat AIDS patients, later handed a single dose of AZT and asked to choose who in her community would receive it. "If the AIDS crisis happened in New York today, we'd all be dead already," she says, and then offers the most practical form of resistance she knows: "Host a dinner party of strangers." Where most art about the AIDS crisis invites sorrow and memory, this piece asks something harder - not to feel, but to show up.