Off Broadway and still shut down

“Selling Kabul” one of many productions in limbo since March

Seven months ago, on a brisk Thursday in March, New York’s theater world came to a sudden halt. Lives were upended, fortunes evaporated, dreams put on hold. Why do people come to New York, if not for some version of the dream embodied by theater: to experience the new, the fantastic, the tragic — some to witness, some to participate in its creation?

No other city has theater quite like New York — or depends on theater for both its economy and its soul.

In September, The New York Times looked in on one production — “Selling Kabul,” which was in rehearsals at Playwrights Horizons when the coronavirus outbreak closed everything down — to see how everyone involved had been affected, from the four actors to the costume assistant to the theater receptionist.

Their stories, which start with their rushed goodbyes March 12, form a New York drama in four acts: the initial shock, the struggle to survive, rethinking life without theater and making plans for coming back.

In the second week of

March, Playwrights Horizons, a nonprofit theater on far West 42nd Street, was buzzing. On its main stage, a new musical called “Unknown Soldier” had just opened, with a full house and a packed opening-night party. Upstairs, actors and stagehands were putting the final touches on “Selling Kabul.” Workers started installing the set; wardrobe designers were customizing a burqa for a male character. Lights were rented from a company in New Jersey. In the offices, the administrative staff was going full speed on the theater’s spring fundraising gala, just two months away.

Much was riding on the next few weeks. The stages at Playwrights can jump-start careers and solidify established ones. Last year, the theater’s production of an audacious musical, “A Strange Loop,” by Michael R. Jackson, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and another play, “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” was a runner-up. “Selling Kabul” would bring everyone a lot of attention.

The novel coronavirus threatened all of that. New

York state recorded its first confirmed COVID-19 case March 1, signaling that the pandemic, once a far-off concern affecting China, then Washington state, had arrived here.

On March 7, Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency. Four days later, on March 11, the NBA suspended its season.

That night Adam Greenfield, the theater’s artistic director, attended a play at Lincoln Center. It was a risk, he knew. His counterpart at the Public Theater downtown, Oskar Eustis, had just gone into the hospital with COVID-19.

“Somehow, in that 30-minute walk from Playwrights to Lincoln Center, everything became really real, really quickly,” he recalled. “The entire mood of the city around me felt different. There was an aura of panic all around.”

The following day, New York state had 328 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 95 of them in the city. Greenfield and Carol Fishman, the general manager, gathered the cast and crew of “Selling Kabul” to announce that they were going on a hiatus until things returned to normal. All of Broadway had gone dark by that evening.

The shutdown, Greenfield remembered telling the group, would be just for a few weeks. Everyone would still be paid; rehearsals could continue on Zoom.

“We told the cast they were going to go home for two weeks,” he said. “They were going to come back in, and we were going to rehearse and go onto the set, have a truncated tech process and open the show a few weeks late. That’s what we believed. But even that felt unthinkable at the time. It was unthinkably sad to us.”

Is there anything more New York than theater? It is both an economic driver and an essential part of the city’s identity. The 41 theaters on Broadway generate more than $16 billion a year in revenue, and they support nearly 100,000 jobs. They bring visitors, fill hotels and restaurants, and define the city for people living continents away. Last season, visitors bought 8.5 million Broadway tickets — the attendance for the Yankees, Mets, Knicks, Nets, Giants and Jets combined.

But while museums and restaurants have reopened in some capacity, and musicians found ways to stream concerts from their living rooms, theater has remained almost entirely dark.

For the cast and crew of “Selling Kabul” — as well as the ticket takers and maintenance staff members — the shutdown began a period of professional and financial insecurity even beyond the normal risks of choosing a life in the theater. Some moved back home with their parents or leaned on their still-working spouses; some enjoyed a temporary boost in their weekly income when the federal government added

$600 to unemployment benefits.

Sylvia Khoury, the playwright, who was in her last year of medical school, began a rotation in telemedicine, listening to people’s symptoms and advising whether they should go to the emergency room.

In interviews, the metaphor that kept cropping up was one attributed to Tyne Rafaeli, the play’s director.

“As Tyne says, theater is like a cockroach,” said Brett Anders, the stage manager. “It survived civilizations and empires coming and going. So why would a pandemic stop us? If I didn’t feel that way, it would be harder to live right now.”

Until the pandemic, Anders supplemented his income by carting materials for several theaters. Now that money was gone as well.

“I worked in food services when I was a kid and through college,” he said. “I’d be happy to find something similar. Grocery store stocking — I’m not above any specific kind of work. I just know I have to jump in that employment pool sooner rather than later.”

He started seeing a therapist to help with the stress. Even so, he said, “there are days when I don’t really feel like talking to anyone, don’t really feel like leaving the house. I just try not to think too hard about everything. And sometimes I can’t shut it all off, and it’s kind of overwhelming.”

Even the area around Playwrights Horizons seemed different. West 42nd Street, a formerly derelict stretch that had become a bustling theater row, was now eerily quiet after dark.

“I felt like I was in those photos from the ’80s,” said Carmen Quiñones, an administrative assistant, who visited the neighborhood in August but did not go into the theater. “To see Midtown restored to the ’80s was heartbreaking.”

For now, Amill’s partner’s income has kept the couple solvent. “I’m a very independent person, so it’s hard to lean on him, but he’s been very understanding and loving,” she said. Some of her theater friends have split up during the pandemic. She felt lucky. “This has strengthened our relationship.”

Jen Schriever, the lighting designer, lost her agent because the pandemic drove him out of business. For her, the pandemic has meant a rare chance to catch her breath. “We pulled our 3-year-old out of pre-k, so I’ve been a full-time mom in a way I haven’t been since my son was 4 weeks old,” she said. “So it’s been kind of a blessing.”

The family eats dinner together almost every night, a ritual Schriever had not experienced since childhood.

For some people in the production, the move to unemployment actually increased their incomes. Ryan Kane and Joan Sergay, both recently out of college and working on fellowships at the theater, had earned weekly stipends of

$300, plus a Metrocard. The $600 supplement to unemployment, which ran until the end of July, more than doubled their weekly incomes.

But they felt the loss in other ways. “Selling Kabul” was the third and final play in their fellowships, which they hoped would lead to their next jobs. Suddenly there were no opportunities to meet the people who might hire them. Sergay, whose fellowship was in directing, hopped a train to her parents’ house in Maryland the night “Selling Kabul” shut down and let the lease on her Brooklyn apartment expire. Since then she has been earning money by tutoring via

Zoom and has scrapped any plans for the near future.

“I feel I’m waiting for life to begin again,” she said. “Most of why I was in New York was the theater.”