“If you’re a comedian, you are doing shows and you’re doing open mics and all of that is now off the table,” said Jaffer Khan, 30, a comic who recently moved to New York from Houston.

Fishbein, who has been with the Magnet through much of its 15-year history as a teacher and performer, put the stakes of an extended closure in stark terms: “We will probably close if there isn’t massive relief efforts for small businesses, period.”

Livestreaming was one way to ensure the show could go on. For $2 to $12 a ticket, Fishbein and her castmates performed on Zoom — a virtual meeting app — as an ensemble from their separate homes, acting out spontaneous bits for their webcams instead of in person onstage. Though community is key to improv, these comics had to find a way to be on the same page without being on the same stage. As it turned out, there wasn’t much physical humor, and they lacked the one thing that all comedians long for: the validation of laughter from a physical audience. There was no way they could tell what was funny and what was not. All they had was each other.

“It feels really awkward,” Fishbein, 37, said in an interview later. “First of all, we were all trying to deal with technical difficulties that we had never dealt with before. But because we’re improvisers, I think we’re pretty adaptable.” She added, “It was interesting to see how you could play in different ways using proximity, object work and your screen.” (Full disclosure: This writer is part of a sketch-writing team at the Magnet and performs standup.)

Still, Rick Andrews, 33, an improv comedian who also took part in the online show, said, “It was cool as performers to see people in the chat and on Facebook afterward, not just being like, ‘Oh it was funny, I liked the show,’ but talking about how it was meaningful for them to connect back to this community because we’re all kind of isolated right now.”