On Thursday, March 12th, the morning after the N.B.A. suspended its season and Donald Trump banned travel from Europe, the actor Emily Cass McDonnell was in rehearsals for an upcoming production of Annie Baker’s play “The Antipodes.” In the play, a group of people sit around a table brainstorming for a project, the exact nature of which is never fully defined. In the last scene, as an apocalyptic storm brews outside, the group’s leader arrives and calls the whole thing off. That Thursday, the finale took on an oracular significance when, weeks into rehearsal, McDonnell and the rest of the cast learned that, due to safety measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus, their show was being cancelled.

McDonnell did not question what needed to be done, but did wonder whether the shutdowns would last. At first, members of the cast discussed whether they might perform the show with lower audience capacity, or live-stream it. They considered reading the script through one last time, but some of the actors felt that it would be too painful, and others had to make arrangements to get back home. A member of the creative team begged the producers to wait to destroy the set, just in case. “I think some people really believed it would be two weeks,” she told me, when we spoke on the phone a few days later. By the next morning, it was clear that even a gathering of the cast would be irresponsible.

New York’s performing-arts scene has taken hits before—after 9/11, during the recession that began in 2007, after Hurricane Sandy—but its elimination for an indefinite period of time is unprecedented. On March 11th and 12th, Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, forbade all gatherings of more than five hundred people, and Broadway and Off Broadway theatres were shut down. The cancellation of theatrical runs, musical tours, comedy shows, club nights, film screenings, book launches, and political fund-raisers quickly followed. The night of Monday, March 16th, when bars and restaurants were officially closed, the calendar had been wiped clean. I have seen small clusters of friends lose their jobs in the past, but last week, when dozens of friends and acquaintances saw their livelihoods evaporate in a matter of twenty-four hours, was different. Requests appeared online: if you could afford to eat the cost of your ticket, consider it a donation to the theatre. If you couldn’t go see the musician live, buy her album on Bandcamp. Night clubs started Venmo accounts for their bartenders and bouncers. Independent bookstores, where readings had been cancelled, offered discounted shipping to people who bought new releases. The world seemed to bifurcate into people who still had jobs (for now) and those who didn’t, with the former anxiously looking for ways to cover for the latter, who were now scrambling for new sources of income, any income. On my social-media feeds, one musician I know offered virtual cello lessons; another offered virtual reiki consultations. People who produce sound events advertised their services mastering music. People put their musical equipment up for sale. As in most cities, the arts scene in New York is inextricably linked to the service and event-production industries, and the loss of creative livelihoods has been compounded by the closures of bars, restaurants, and coffee shops, and the cancellations of weddings, conferences, and other large events. Day jobs and night jobs disappeared at the same time.

I spoke with McDonnell on Tuesday, the day that she had been scheduled to fly from New York, where the production had held its rehearsals, to Los Angeles, where its opening night would have been held, at the Mark Taper Forum, on April 1st. She had just learned that she and the rest of the cast would be paid for exactly one more week. She had spent the morning on the phone, trying to negotiate a less punitive severance. She had called the state about unemployment benefits, and had spent almost an hour on hold with the New York Department of Labor, who told her to call back on April 4th, when she would qualify. She wondered whether, on April 4th, there would still be a Department of Labor to call—the person she spoke with, who was still working from an office, told her that he couldn’t work remotely because he didn’t own a computer.

Her concerns were not only material but existential. Like many of us, McDonnell had spent the weekend coming to understand that the night life and culture that many of us are missing will not simply reconstitute itself the moment we can all hang out together again. Venues will close. Young people who came to New York to pursue creative careers and can no longer pay their rents will return to the cities they came from. McDonnell, who lives alone, felt isolated and worried. Online chatter about watching television and cooking beans was not helping. “I can’t concentrate,” she told me on the phone, last Tuesday. “I haven’t settled into watching shows and reading my books and catching up on things. I know that everyone’s in shock and trying to make the best of it and deal with it but the whole notion of a staycation feels super offensive to me.”

After the barrage of closures of last week, many of the performers I spoke with were still in this process of adjustment. For an office worker, the question of how to exercise can be answered with a yoga video in the living room; for a dancer, maintaining physical conditioning without space to move can be more difficult. (Alicia Graf Mack, the director of dance at the Juilliard School, broadcast a barre class online from an empty studio: “We don’t have music today,” she says. “I’ll talk you through.”) Writers, who at least can console themselves with the fact that a book is a material object that exists independent of groups of people, are lamenting the rare chance that a book launch offers to emerge from solitude and interact with an audience. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, whose second novel, “Hex,” will be published at the end of the month, told me, “The failure to celebrate becomes this weird transcendent problem with respect to work that has taken years.” Dinerstein Knight had events planned in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, all of which have been cancelled. “Aside from the couple hundred of book sales that we would have brought in at those larger events, the word of mouth and the community building and the sort of long extension of those events in those geographies is unquantifiable.”

Plays that were going before an audience for the first time might never get their chance. Daniel Goldstein co-wrote the musical “Unknown Soldier” with the late Michael Friedman. Its run at Playwrights Horizons was cancelled the week of its première. “My colleagues and producers will never get to see it,” he said. “The actors are sad because they had a show that they loved and believed in, and for a lot of them it was going to be their New York débuts.” But the most pressing needs were economic. “All theatre people, except the ones who have institutional jobs—we’re gig people,” Goldstein, whose day job, as an associate director on the Broadway show “Come From Away” is also now gone, said. “We’re no different than a handyman. When the theatres closed we were literally all unemployed. Everyone I know is unemployed.”

The economic fallout of the virus has made the disparity between employed workers and independent contractors clearer than ever. New York has a paid-sick-leave law, but it does not cover contract workers. Many freelance workers in the arts have high self-employment taxes and health-insurance costs; they do not have 401(k) matching programs or employer-backed disability insurance, or severance when work is called off. If artists have health insurance through a guild or a union, coverage is usually dependent on working for a certain number of weeks every year. “Think about losing your health coverage in the midst of a pandemic,” Len Egert, the national executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists, a union that represents workers in the fields of opera, choral music, and dance, said. The union has more than sixty collective-bargaining agreements. Egert told me the response has varied by company. “Some companies are stepping up and doing great—Sarasota Ballet is paying dancers through their contracted season,” he told me. “Other companies are cancelling a performance and not paying anything.”