Curtain time was drawing near for Mummenschanz’s “you & me” at San Jose’s Hammer Theatre Center, so to maintain a sense of normalcy, I went through my standard theater criticism rituals as best I could.

I got dressed up and put on some lipstick. I opened my notebook to a clean page. I couldn’t take my standard social-media-worthy photo of the show’s program in front ofthe stage, so I asked my husband to take aphoto of me at my humble home office. I closed all windows and apps that might ping, but I couldn’t shut down all my electronic devices. I’d need one to watch the show.

As I prepare to review a livestream of@mummenschanzat the Hammer Theatre Center, in lieu of my standard playbill-and-set photo, here’s a theater-critic-and-home-office photopic.twitter.com/GZaRrcAzVs

— Lily Janiak (@LilyJaniak)March 17, 2020

It was my first time reviewing alive-streamed performance, and I was nervous. What if I made a mistake with the technology? Even worse, if the experience were lousy — if the translation of theater to my laptop were so unpalatable that I couldn’t honestly recommend it to audiences — would I have to write a review that cast further gloom on an art form facing its greatest crisis in a generation?

Swiss mime troupe Mummenschanz had been scheduled to perform “you & me” Monday-Tuesday, March 16-17, at the Hammer. But on Friday, March 13, Santa Clara County banned gatherings of more than 100 people. Hammer Theatre Center Executive Director Chris Burrill had already been rereading the force majeure (act of God) clause in his contract.

“We made the decision to offer to refund everybody that had an in-person ticket,” he told The Chronicle by phone. “And since we’re located in Silicon Valley … we were able to instantly pivot and say, why don’t we live-stream them?”

The Hammer had recently benefited frommore than $1 million in upgrades from San Jose State University, which operates the facility. Among those upgrades was a high-definition, low-light camera, which heretofore had been used only to live-stream shows in the lobby for latecomers. On Monday, that camera made its debut broadcasting to a much wider audience. (Originally, the Hammer planned to live-stream Tuesday’s performance as well, but that was before theshelter-in-place orderc,有效anceled the second live stream.)

Mummenschanz founding member Floriana Frassetto, who created “you & me,” said that the decision to permit the live stream was “very immediate.” She was glad there was some way audiences would still be able to enjoy the show, in which a quintet of performers give rambunctious life to abstract shapes of various sizes — some towering, monster-sized blobs, others just the size of a gloved hand, all floating and darting and rearing through the full length of the proscenium stage, and sometimes beyond it.

“这不是当你不坐在相同auditorium,” she said, “and you wonder how many people are in the shape, and where their head is, where their behind is: ‘How are they doing it anyway, can they breathe, can they see?’ On film it all looks a bit easier.”The afternoon before the performance, she was hoping the film would still convey at least some of “that magic and those emotions and that purity, that interactivity that we love to portray.”

It wouldn’t be feasible to restagethe show, which has been touring internationally since 2016, for the camera, but “the intensity of the lights will be stronger,” to make “you & me” look better on film.

The lights on that HD camera looked so gorgeous I frequently had the illusion — especially with all Mummenschanz’s shapes and colors — that I was watching one of those wordless shorts at the top of a bill with a full-length Pixar feature. At other times, particularly when the camera zoomed out to take in some of the audience members (all invite-only as special guests of Mummenschanz or Hammer Theatre Center workers, and all scattered many seats apart to abide by self-distancing regulations), I felt as if a tiny puppet stage had been packed into my computer, not just the seahorses and lampreys and stick figures and fish that Mummenschanz ingeniously fashion from scrunched tubes, coiled or inflated sheets, but also the audiences. Somehow they looked like puppets, too.

At still other times, I felt acutely the mediation by screen, my disconnection from performers and my fellow audience members — not least when my browser evidently repeated two scenes already shown and then skipped ahead to catch up.

I found myself craving and delighting in the laughter and “aww” sounds from the few spectators who were there in person. They gave me solace that I was still understanding many of the artists’ intentions. Yes, that green slug is disappointed that it didn’t get to chow down on that leaf! Yes, that little fish is terrified by the way those two swans have reared their heads! Yet when audiences reacted audibly to a moment I couldn’t parse, I felt all the more disappointed and frustrated.

Still, on the whole, Mummenschanz’s “you & me” was blissful, a precious escape. They can position and reposition appendages such that performers’ innards seem to be made of goo. They can take 10 white rectangles and create two characters and a relationship and a story. They are masters of the reveal — how a sudden switch of perspective can reveal hitherto hidden mouse ears, or four hands where you thought there were two. When they present an egg shape and hold it perfectly still for a few moments, your eyes start to deceive you — you think you see it vibrating slightly, maybe growing. “No, impossible,” your brain says. And then it does transform, though not in the way you expect.

“You & me” is a testament to the human imagination at a time when we have never needed it more. Mummenschanz’s ability to see the potential in a simple shape, to keep playing with it and opening it up until its myriad stories unfurl, is instructive for all of us when we’re stuck at home, looking at the same old shapes in our kitchens and living rooms.

There was one moment in the show that made me weep with joy, that I must describe fully, spoilers be damned: Two violins with beady eyes were squabbling with each other, making discordant music via pizzicato. In lumbered two giant triangles stacked on top of each other, rather like a Christmas tree. The shape carried two sticks. Were they stringed bows, that the violins might play more mellifluously? Swords, to augment their fighting? No, they started swaying in time. It was a metronome, to help the two instruments find each other’s rhythm.

May we all be each other’s duet partners and metronomes right now.