. Pressman’s feeling that COVID-19 has become the devil we know rather than the devil we don’t is in keeping with swiftly changing public sentiment in the face of the staggering Omicron surge. There is less palpable fear in the air as the vaccinated and boosted come to terms with the fact that an increasing chance of infection will likely come with milder symptoms.
“We always have to ask, ‘Is it safe for artists and is it safe for audiences?’” Pressman tells The Times. As of now, the answer, she says, is yes. “We still had breakthrough infections and performed a show or two — most places have — but at a certain point you don’t have the depth of the bench to keep the show going,” she says. “What Omicron did was change all our protocols because it sped up the calculations.”
Omicron has a faster incubation period and two doses of vaccine no longer provide adequate protection against infection. This means that testing cast and crew two or three times a week may no longer be sufficient, Pressman says. Daily testing, particularly for actors who must go unmasked onstage, might now make sense — and approaches to this are being discussed and are expected to evolve along with the pandemic. Medical-grade masks backstage are a must for everyone involved in a show .
Nonetheless, the situation — with increasing costs and decreasing attendance — can’t continue indefinitely. Pressman says that CTG can operate on this footing for another six months or so before it will need another source of funding to shore up the $10 million shuttered venue operating grant it received earlier in the pandemic.
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