It is a late period painting completed between March and April at his home and studio in Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City, four years before his death at age 84.

Josephine shared this information with American historian James Flexner, who personally approached the president of a chain of theaters and arranged a deal, only to have Hopper back out.

Hopper made a preliminary or compositional sketch (ébauche) in pencil lines, which remains evident in the edges of the stage and the proscenium arch in the final painting.

[9] Art historian Ivo Kranzfelder places the painting within the context of the metaphor of the theatrum mundi, the ancient idea that the world is a theater where people are the characters in a drama.

[7] Levin writes that Hopper "saw the theater as a metaphor for life, and himself as a kind of stage director, setting up scenes to paint based on events he saw take place around him, casting his characters from types he observed.

[13] The tweet went viral, sparking a global conversation about Hopper's paintings and the loneliness and isolation people were experiencing due to pandemic health measures.

In an article for The Guardian, Jones compared the relevance of Hopper and the "loneliness and alienation of modern life" in his 1950s and 1960s paintings to contemporary society caught up by the coronavirus restrictions.

[15] Trying to make sense of the meme, Jones describes the succession of images as "a woman alone in a deserted cinema [Intermission], a man bereft in his modern apartment [Office in a Small City], a lonely shop worker [New York Office] and people sitting far apart at tables for one in a diner [Sunlight in a Cafeteria]..."[16] Hopper's images of solitude and loneliness connect to people during the pandemic era, Jones argues, because when one loses the liberties we take for granted, loneliness as Hopper painted it is the only thing remaining.

[15] Biochemist and art essayist Joseph L. Goldstein argues that Hopper was the artist who best foreshadowed and represented the isolation and separation experienced by the general public dealing with COVID-19.

[20] Deutsch said he was interested in exploring the history of film with Shirley, noting that the tableau vivant was a 19th-century precursor to filmmaking which originally used live people to model influential paintings.