ON THE AFTERNOON OF WEDNESDAY, March 11, I went to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre to catch the last few minutes of my play The Inheritance. It was a matinee day, which meant a marathon—part one in the afternoon, part two in the evening. We did three of these each week, a grueling schedule for the actors (the play runs six and a half hours in total), but they loved being able to tell the entire story in one go, for an audience that had committed to being at the theater all day.

The ending of part one, in which we honor those whose lives came abruptly to an end during the AIDS epidemic, has always elicited a strong emotional reaction. On this day, it was noticeably heightened. Someone upstairs was sobbing loudly, and their unreserved expression of grief seemed to give permission to the rest of the audience to feel their own.

After the curtain came down, I stood in the back of the house, waiting for a friend who was at the show. I watched as people filed up the aisle in that now-unthinkable crush of proximity that once followed every live performance. Inside the theater, it felt like any other day at The Inheritance. Outside, there was the palpable sense that the bottom was about to fall out.

As we headed to dinner, my friend and I talked about the play and reminisced about the past—I met her in 1984 doing community theater together in my hometown. She was 26 and I was seven, and she quickly became an auntlike figure in my life. We spoke only obliquely about what was happening—her flight up from Florida had been nearly empty; her friends thought she was crazy for making the trip. We preferred instead to talk wistfully of the past and excitedly about the future. At that point, I did not know anyone who had contracted the virus. As I write this piece a month later, I know at least two dozen.

And I have lost a dear friend.

It’s tempting to compare the epidemic we are currently living through to the one that’s examined in The Inheritance—a contemporary reimagining of E. M. Forster’s Howards End in which the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early ’90s is examined through the experiences of young gay men living a generation removed from the worst moments of that cataclysm. There are, of course, glaring similarities between then and now—a callous president dangerously out of his depth; a disastrously inept federal response. But unlike then, this virus has not singled out one particular community to ravage—all our bodies are vulnerable. Perhaps the most useful comparison isn’t one of facts but rather one of feeling. Every conversation now seems to include the question, “Are you healthy?” We speak of our friends who have become sick. And daily, we watch the death toll rise. It seems as though the entire world is now experiencing a version of what it must have felt like to be a gay man in the 1980s.