I keep writing about collapse, but I think it’s writing back.
— Prophet from the Wrong Decade, Wake Up and Smell the C*VID
As New York State’s budget deadline looms, so too does the specter of a proposed mask ban: introduced under the guise of “public order”, but carrying chilling implications for civil liberties, public health, and the right to protest.
At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic rages silently on, even as the Economist estimates COVID has killed more than 26 million people worldwide, and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that one in 20 people now have Long COVID, the forced disappearance of one of our most basic protections—the mask—is both metaphor and material crisis.
Into that silence comes a disruption: a one-night-only performance. No curtain. No venue name. No names at all, really. Just a folding chair, a spotlight, and a ghost.
Wake Up and Smell the C*VID: An Evening Without Eric Bogosian
Wake Up and Smell the C*VID: An Evening Without Eric Bogosian is a one-night hybrid performance on 24 April in New York. Produced by HEPA (Holy Erotic Propaganda Arson)—a transdisciplinary collective of artists, activists, and academic researchers—it is a ritual, a reckoning, and a refusal.
It doesn’t have a traditional venue. The location will be revealed upon registration for those attending in person. Others will join via Zoom. That’s not just an aesthetic choice—it’s a necessity.
Cast members remain anonymous—for health, safety, and protection from harassment. The fact that this is even necessary says everything. While clinically vulnerable members of the performing arts community have been shut out of traditional spaces since the beginning of the pandemic, the criminalisation of masks, weaponisation of surveillance tech, and targeted harassment are rapidly raising new barriers. Collaborating with this systematic silencing is the algorithmic suppression of COVID research and amplification of disinformation on social media.
This is not here to shout over the silence. It’s here to cut into it.
While it’s being billed as a satire, a haunt, a throwback to 1980s black-box monologue performance—intimate, confrontational, political—it’s also something else: a reckoning. The performance draws both form and fire from the AIDS crisis-era downtown theatre scene. But it updates the urgency for an era of mass disabling and algorithmically-enforced disinformation. At the center is a fictional septuagenarian playwright who’s telling the world it’s collapsing while overlooking the collapse of his community—and his own vascular system.
SARS-CoV-2 isn’t just a respiratory virus. And COVID isn’t a flu. It’s a vascular disease. Not unlike another virus that devastated NYC theatre community, the virus persists in the body causing long-term damage to the immune system, including T-cell depletion. Every reinfection increases risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, cognitive decline, and more. And in the theatre world, it’s doing something else: ending careers in silence.
After a winter of discontent, a spring of awakening
The show’s subtitle – An Evening Without Eric Bogosian– is not parody. It’s eulogy. It’s a kind of desperate, furious love letter to artists who once wrote with prophetic clarity, who shaped the form, but now stand quietly aside while others disappear.
And disappear they have.
This winter season, high-profile productions were devastated by infectious diseases tearing through the company. Between 23-29 December, Audra McDonald’s Gypsy went dark for seven out of eight performances. Romeo and Juliet was spared cancellations, but reportedly only continued with the support of five emergency covers, including on who had a script in hand. Severe illnesses are putting increasing pressure on already systemically under resourced understudies.
Unprecedented illness-related cancellations are happening on both sides of the Atlantic. In November, David Tennant’s Macbeth at Harold Pinter Theatre on the West End, which broke box office records, was cancelled for five performances and only returned to the stage with six emergency covers.
Direct action
In December, Protect the Heart of the Arts, an action network sounding the alarm on the Long COVID emergency in the performing arts, held a festive mask hand out during the play’s closing weekend in order to call for improved air quality in theatres, including HEPA air filtration, molecular testing for SARS-CoV-2 and masks.
Ticket holders were also impacted by these cancellations, as many travelled long distances to see these productions, and theatres reportedly notified ticket holders with as little as two hours’ notice, possibly indicating an attempt to push through serious illnesses — or a cynical strategy to withhold pay from members of staff not covered by union agreements (e.g. hourly front-of-house staff, people working on a freelance basis, etc.) while keeping non-refundable transaction fees.
While the corporate owners of theatres are typically covered by insurance, cast, crew, venue staff, audiences and the theatres themselves are left holding the bag. While none of these cancellations were attributed to COVID, business interruption insurance often excludes COVID as a foreseeable event, so theatres are financially disincentivised to report COVID in casts or, perhaps more ominously, to test for it.
COVID: creating myriad problems
The pandemic is also creating front-of-house problems with aggressive and disruptive audience members, including an audience altercation at Macbeth and The Bodyguard in Manchester, where police riot vans were called in.
A recent survey by the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph, and Theatre Union (BECTU) found that 90% of theatre workers had experienced or witnessed unacceptable behavior from audiences, with 70% saying such incidents have worsened since the beginning of pandemic.
While many attribute this to social deficits acquired five years ago during lockdowns, settled knowledge on COVID’s neurological damage and implication in anti-social behaviour reveals that the ongoing pandemic is at generating a crisis of aggression and disinhibition.
Backstage, there’s a quiet pandemic of vocal injuries. The West End Macbeth also made headlines when a performer lost her voice mid-monologue. While it’s impossible to know whether this was the result of vocal fatigue after a long run, a mountain of research now shows that COVID infections are eroding the vocal health of performers. A 2022 Journal of Voice study found 30% of Broadway singers suffered long-term vocal changes after COVID. And yet the shows go on.
Transatlantic advocacy for clean air in theatres
Members of the performing arts community and allies are steadily making progress towards improved air quality in theatres.
COVID-conscious performer and advocate Ezra Tozian has emerged as a leading voice in creating actionable, artist-led safety protocols for the stage. In their recent HowlRound essay, they outline concrete best practices—from negotiating HEPA filtration and PlusLife molecular testing, to protected masking policies, and advocating for audience safety. Their work emphasises that these aren’t fringe demands, but necessary infrastructure for disabled and immunocompromised artists to survive and thrive in the industry. As they write:
COVID protections that keep us safe and working benefit the entire industry.
Across the Atlantic, Sally Witcher OBE, founder of INN the Arts, promotes safe inclusion in the arts by developing and supporting good practice on reducing risk from airborne infections. They are currently engaged in ongoing discussions with theaters and venues about best practices for clean air. National institutions in the UK like the National Theatre and Barbican have installed upgraded air systems. But these remain exceptions, not norms.
A haunt, not a monologue
Wake Up and Smell the C*VID isn’t a typical play—it’s an intervention. A rupture. A refusal.
It refuses the erasure of an ongoing mass disabling event. It refuses the silence of elders who once made their name on prophetic clarity but now fail to register the evidence seared onto their own bodies. It refuses to compartmentalize devastation, to defer to legacy, to treat collapse as metaphor when it is flesh and blood.
In a time when public health information is being disappeared, when masks are banned in the name of “security,” and disabled lives are framed as disposable, this piece becomes something more than theatre. It is ritual. It is refusal. It is an attempt to speak aloud about what the algorithms bury. To cry out—yes, polemically, but also spiritually, viscerally—against the forgetting.
When oligarchs tear apart the fabric of consensual reality, declaring themselves gods and demanding the rest of us just disappear, Wake Up and Smell the C*VID asks: will we assent to being made ghosts in our own communities—in our own bodies—or rise to the challenge of this moment and become something more?
How can theatre be a sacred ground for collective reckoning—and maybe even collective awakening?
Smell the C*VID
Mutual Aid Statement:
All proceeds from Wake Up and Smell the C*VID will go to support members of the performing arts community impacted by COVID as well as to NY-area mutual aid. Receipts on request.
Disclaimer:
Wake Up and Smell the C*VID: An Evening Without Eric Bogosian is an independent artistic production and is in no way affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in collaboration with Eric Bogosian. The use of his name is intended as artistic commentary and homage, and does not imply any association, approval, or participation by Mr. Bogosian. All content and viewpoints expressed are solely those of the creators.
Featured image and additional images supplied
