He Invited Us Into His Closet for Theater. And It Was Astonishing.

Joshua William Gelb turned a small space in his small apartment into a blueprint for streaming during the pandemic. But what happens as real venues open again?

Like proud proprietors of performing arts centers everywhere, Joshua William Gelb is eager to show off his theater. But the tour takes only five seconds, because the theater is a closet. Still, it’s a privilege to step inside. Since he started doing shows in the 2-foot-by-4-foot-by-8-foot enclosure in March 2020, when the pandemic landed on live entertainment like a lead apron, no one but Gelb has been in it. For that matter, only six people besides himself have set foot in the East Village shotgun apartment where he and the closet live. The first three, last summer, worked with him on a sci-fi-meets-Three Stooges mash-up called “The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy.” The fourth, five months later, was Jianqiao Lu, who, gloved and N95’d, applied makeup for “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” in which Gelb played Mother Teresa in blue eye shadow. Only today, on a beastly summer afternoon, have a fifth and a sixth visitor been admitted. Nick Lehane, Gelb’s friend since graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University, will portray his doppelgänger in the evening’s two livestreams of “The Nine O’Clock Problem.” Lehane is wearing a gas mask — though in this case it’s a prop, not a precaution.