After a Midsummer Shiver, Provincetown Proceeds With Care

PROVINCETOWN, Mass. — Varla Jean Merman made her entrance at the top of the show dressed as a syringe of vaccine.

Shimmery and skirted, the costume was perfectly matched to her solo show’s double-entendre title, “Little Prick,” and its opening number, a comic ode to vaccination sung to the tune of the Kool & the Gang song “Celebration.” The hypodermic headpiece was tricked out to squirt liquid, of course.

“Honey, did I get any on you?” a faux-solicitous Varla asked a man in the front row one evening in late July. “Well, don’t worry. It’s just bleach.”

Joking. She was joking. And Provincetown — wary in the wake of a coronavirus outbreak here that made national headlines and gave the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention new insights into how even vaccinated people can carry high viral loads of the Delta variant — needed a laugh.

In this tiny, tourist-dependent queer mecca at the farthest tip of Cape Cod, the mood was dramatically different back in mid-June, when Varla started her season of drag cabaret at the Crown & Anchor. Originally she opened the show with a number that she would end up cutting when, overnight, it stopped feeling right: Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.”

But that song’s spirit fit the post-vaccine relief of early summer, not just here but everywhere — the sense that after so much separation and sacrifice, it was finally safe for people to get together and get wild.

So over Provincetown’s Fourth of July, and in the busy two weeks that followed, they did. Soon vaccinated people who had thought they were safe from infection were testing positive for Covid in alarming numbers — a development that led the C.D.C. to change its indoor-masking guidance nationwide.

For the town, which had been hoping for a comeback summer, all of this brought on flashback anxieties about whether visitors would stay away, and whether the restaurants and galleries, the shops and the shows, would end up suffering in a season that had begun so bountifully, with crowds once again packing the narrow streets and intimate indoor spaces.

“There were no restrictions,” Jeffery Roberson, who plays Varla, marveled one afternoon at the Crown, near the poolside open-air stage that began last year as a pandemic innovation. “It kind of seems crazy now to me. Like, why didn’t we just ease into things?”

His show this year is gleefully funny, but Roberson said he was sorry that I hadn’t gotten to see it performed with live music. His piano player, he said, was out with Covid.

I HAVE LOVED PROVINCETOWN since I was a little tourist kid flocking to the candy store for peanut butter fudge on days too gray for the beach.

Last summer, with so much of the town’s signature liveliness replaced by pandemic quietude, coming here was like visiting a stricken relative. This summer, it’s like seeing them hit a scary bump in what had been an encouraging convalescence — the threat to their wellness not yet vanquished, much as you wish it would be.

From late July into August, I spent over a week in town seeing performances and feeling perfectly safe. I chose shows that were either outside or in indoor spaces that required proof of vaccination, where I kept my mask on even if lowering it to take a drink was allowed. I thought a lot — more than I’d expected — about what sets off alarm bells for me, and what I might regret. No piano bars or karaoke, then, with unmasked people all around; no indoor, vaccine-optional cabaret.

This is not a scare story about Provincetown, whose Covid numbers have dropped as its Covid precautions have risen. What happened here could have happened anywhere that invites the world to visit, as Cape Cod does in the summertime — and as New York and other big cities do year-round in ordinary times.

The frightening part of this story is that Provincetown’s charming little ecosystem of restaurants, inns and performance spaces is a microcosm of the precarious ecosystems of dining, travel and live entertainment that exist elsewhere. During my visit, as usually packed parking lots failed to fill and businesses took what the weekly Provincetown Independent called “a nosedive,” I saw a community waiting worriedly for the customers its economy relies on to return en masse.

“Covid, unfortunately — and I think it’s depressing for many of us — isn’t going away anytime soon,” the town manager, Alex Morse, said at an emergency meeting on July 25 that resulted in an indoor mask mandate. “Provincetown is experiencing what other places will be experiencing, earlier.”

Like Broadway with its vaccine requirement, like towns everywhere, this place is trying to find the secret to keeping doors open and workers and visitors safe.

AN ARTSY, CRUNCHY, shaggy-gentrified beach community, at once remote and cosmopolitan, Provincetown is known for its friendliness to outcasts and oddballs.

“Provincetown is so welcoming,” said Mark Cortale, the producing artistic director of the 127-seat Art House, whose stage is open again, to vaccinated and masked audiences, after last summer’s pandemic closure. “But when it comes down to welcoming the unvaccinated, this is the first time I’ve seen people draw the line.”

One of Cortale’s competitors, Kenneth Horgan of Pilgrim House, did so boldly last month in the midst of the spike, telling The Cape Cod Times: “If you’re not vaccinated, don’t come here. We don’t want you here.”

Pilgrim House, too, requires proof of vaccination to take in acts like the daffy beauty queen Miss Richfield 1981, played by Russ King. Last year, King was one of the intrepid few performers in town, doing his drag show on a makeshift stage in front of socially distanced audiences in the gravel parking lot.

This year, King is back indoors. In the show, Miss Richfield mentions that in 1981, the year of her pageant victory, Prince Charles and Lady Diana got married a few weeks after The New York Times first mentioned a cancer that was cropping up in gay men: the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

Not long after Miss Richfield made that connection in my brain, I went to interview the comedian Judy Gold on the back porch of her longtime second home here, where she has spent much of the pandemic. I hadn’t even sat down when she started venting about “the [expletive] spike.”

“It makes me so angry,” she said, noting that in the off-season, the Covid numbers in this public-health-conscious town had been minuscule. The vaccination rate, meanwhile, is off the charts.

“And then the summer comes and you’re partying like it’s 1980,” she said. “I mean, we should know better. Our community already went through a plague. People have compromised immune systems here.”

That, though, is another thing it’s safe to guess that the population of Provincetown has in common with people who attend and work in theater: A significant number are older or are living with H.I.V. Caution is required.

Two nights later, 15 minutes before showtime, Gold glided up on her bike in front of the Art House, where she is glad to have four walls around her again after performing outside at the Crown last summer. Still, she did grouse about the audience’s masks; she likes to be able to see people respond to her jokes.

But those four walls did their job, acoustically. Even through the masks, she could hear the laughter of her crowd. And we could hear one another.

THE LAST PERFORMANCE I saw was the one that ripped me gloriously, unexpectedly to pieces: Judy Kuhn and Seth Rudetsky in one of the pianist’s Broadway @ The Art House shows.

Kuhn, whose fourth and most recent Tony Award nomination was for “Fun Home,” walked onto the stage and looked powerfully moved to be there. For a flickering instant, she seemed on the verge of being overcome by emotion — and no wonder. As she explained, it was her first time onstage, in front of an audience, since December 2019. She had been in rehearsals for the Off Broadway revival of “Assassins” when the pandemic hit.

It was a sparkling performance, but playful too, and when Kuhn sang “Vanilla Ice Cream,” from “She Loves Me,” it reached a pinnacle of musical theater artistry that I hadn’t known I was aching for. Afterward, I walked around town for over an hour, just absorbing the show. But while I was sitting in the audience, I did think: So what if we have to wear masks to be present for something this thrilling? So what?

The next day, on the front porch of the hotel where Kuhn and Rudetsky were staying, they talked about how vital it was to them that audience members were vaccinated and masked — because even if the Delta variant is unlikely to make vaccinated people very sick, they can still pass it on.

“And the doors,” said Rudetsky, who is so impassioned about Covid safety that he spent a week early last month lobbying Cortale to implement the vaccination requirement at the Art House. “Did you notice the doors were opening?”

I had noticed one door, but not the timing of it. During the show, he told me, every time he and Kuhn were talking rather than doing a song, doors were opened backstage, in the front of the auditorium and behind the audience — to get the air flowing.

Cortale, too, mentioned plans to open the windows this month when he brings Broadway stars including Kelli O’Hara and Stephanie J. Block to the 700-seat Provincetown Town Hall, where vaccinations and masks will be required.

These are such simple measures, and they make such a difference to the quality of the experience. If artists and staff don’t feel safe, they can’t do their jobs properly. If audiences don’t feel safe, they won’t pay attention to the show. Or they won’t come.

As Kuhn said, “We only know what we know today, and we may know other things tomorrow.”

So it goes in a pandemic. But we need to be brave enoughto act on what we do know now — to try to nurse our fragile ecosystems back to health, and keep them there.