At first William held the readings in his apartment, which was really his parents' apartment. He probably wouldn't like me to say that. They were dramatic events, not just because the guests were mostly actors, but also because William, trained as a director of the theater, knows how to put together a night. A night means some drinks, some entertainment, and dinner. On the best nights, all three kind of happen at once and flow naturally into one another.

I mention that it was his parents' apartment because readings like this wouldn't be as fun, or possible (in terms of space) in most of the apartments of the people I'm friends with. Like a good director, William used the space. During a reading of Doctor Faustus, he had us spread out across the living room floor and shine bulbs into each other's faces as we spoke. The mess of cables threatened to derail the performance, but the resulting experience was delightfully exposed.

William's parents apartment is on the 12th floor of a 5th Avenue art deco building by Emery Roth, the Hungarian émigré architect whose designs left an indelible mark on the residential landscape of Manhattan. Roth dreamed up the Beresford, the San Remo, the Eldorado: late 1920s fortresses on Central Park West whose twin towers prefigured the pinnacle—in the form of the World Trade Center, which Roth's sons later helped sculpt—of the midcentury architecture Roth's firm churned out long past his death.

The building where we read plays was built in 1922. It's held together by Flemish bond brick, and the terracotta loggias on the third and twelfth floors are in the Spanish Renaissance style. The big living room windows face west, supplying a view of the rest of the historic Village and out onto the wine-dark Hudson. Unlike most of the attendees of the performances, I'm not and have never been an actor*; because I was nervous the first few times I attended, I went to a nearby bar, put away some beers and smoked a couple cigarettes before heading to the apartment. One evening when I arrived uncharacteristically on time (therefore early), William asked me to wipe down the glass table in the living room in order that the late afternoon sun not highlight any smudges. A little tipsy, and grateful for a task, I complied.

We read plays by Chekhov, Marlowe, Caryl Churchill. Most of the actors I didn't know, or maybe I'd met them once in college. I was surprised at how they defied certain stereotypes about student theater, though it's possible William only invited the ones who are nice, and smart. They'd show up with six packs of craft beer; I'd bring a bottle of wine from the liquor store a couple blocks away; William would make salmon, which in my memory he got from Whole Foods. Later, during the pandemic, he would be briefly employed at a Whole Foods, a job obtained for the sole purpose of obtaining an early dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. At the group readings, he made us all feel like essential workers.

Which isn't to say that parts were evenly distributed. It took a few serious last-minute no-shows for me to get more than a handful of speaking lines, and at the first few readings I was mostly relegated to bit-part dialogue: bawdy servant-women or tongue-tied demons. I relished the few monologues he provided me, probably because I felt I had something to prove to the others—that although I might not know anything about acting, I knew something about reading. I had been commended as a child for my ability to read in church, an activity that requires a very specific quality of fearfulness.

This came in handy when the readings eventually moved online. I thought briefly that William had cracked up—at the beginning of the pandemic, I thought perhaps we all had—when he emailed us about a Zoom performance of the Book of Revelation. Looking back, I can see that he was thinking more clearly than most; he knew the world wasn't about to end, but that it already had. William Fedexed each of the participants a mysterious wooden box, an at-home set that slowly unfurled—via crank—over the course of the reading. It was magical, fun. The text itself turned out to be half scripture, half William's own work. He'd incorporated a series of provocative and playful monologues that broke up the drone and sublimity of Revelation thrillingly.

During the readings in William's parents' apartment, we were immersed. But there is no such thing as immersion on Zoom. The mediation of the screen, on top of the fact that William's digital readings never used cameras, meant that the pandemic readings were always fundamentally distanced and therefore deeply fragile. I wonder if William was thinking about this when he chose the last play we performed, Brecht's Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. In a Zoom play reading, where there is no audience beyond the performers themselves, and where the performers themselves are doing their best to keep track of many small speaking parts detailed on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet occurring over the course of a two-hour reading, certain things get left behind.

For instance, a sense of narrative or historical context. Beyond the Brecht's purposeful confusion, we journeyed into works by Dario Fo (The Accidental Death of An Anarchist) and Kafka ("In the Penal Colony", in William's translation) during which it was hard to keep track of what, if anything, was happening. I feel the need to reemphasize that online reading is lonely and distracting. By removing the visual element—by which I mean, the element of seeing someone perform, or in the cases of the in-person readings, enunciate, the text—a part of the viewer's basic interpretive toolkit is lost. Thus, the Zoom plays were sometimes more like listening to people reading poetry than they were being in a "play."

William knew and took advantage of this, I believe. Recently he told me he was revisiting Susan Sontag. In an early essay, "Marat/Sade/Artaud," Sontag endorsed a theater of the senses that goes beyond dialogue and psychology to a realm of performance where ideas themselves are "decor, props, sensuous material." At their most vivid, the readings William organized during the pandemic were hours of sensuously awkward speech, the flow of interpolated voices rising beyond a sense of meaning, narrative or text and embracing the spontaneity of "reading," whatever that activity meant for each participant in their moment. Left only to the sounds of each other's voices, we found a way to relish the blackness of isolation, to listen—or in those many instances when distraction overwhelmed our attempts at presence, at performing together—merely to hear.

When I met William for a freezing meal at the new Upper West Side Tacombi in December, he was considering moving out of Greenwich Village and into an apartment, or room, of his own. Then a few weeks later, I found out from a mutual friend he was planning to move to Berlin. What had happened? In the one time I'd seen him between those two events, he'd impishly hurled a copy of Nabokov's novel Pnin into the roaring fireplace at his parents' apartment. It was the most intoxicated I'd ever seen him; he seemed truly happy, even though he vomited later. He'd asked earlier that evening, the evening of the New Year, why I was behaving nervously. I had had a lot on my mind, and I told him that I was experiencing some anxiety, a sense of detachment. "I've never been anxious!" he declared. I questioned him then, but I believe him now.

What held the performances together—indeed, what willed them into being—was William. He is simply unafraid of harassing people into participation, because he's possessed of the invaluable knowledge that all people ultimately want to be cajoled into doing things that will surprise them, as Emerson wrote, out of their propriety. In lockdown, propriety has carried a more palpable moral weight than ever; it has also paradoxically posed more of a threat to worldhood—our being-among-each-other—than any other phenomenon in our lifetime. I hated Richard Wilbur's translation of Moliere's The Misanthrope more than almost any text I've read in English, but I have to admit that it shocked me, temporarily, out of myself. How else to be uncomfortable in that way, in this time?

The online pandemic readings did not recreate a sense of in-person community performance, but they did make us, the participants, aware of the absolute strangeness of communication in general, an uncanny not necessarily diminished by being told what to say. The "performances" showed us how isolation had mutilated our social instincts, how much we might have to relearn when we returned to our bodies. They also legitimized, in a time where we needed it, the experience of feeling boldly, ludicrously detached. Not even someone as deliciously prepared as William could anticipate the silliness of some moments in these otherwise serious readings—the beauties of no rehearsal. My friend Matthew, a filmmaker and educator who runs an early jazz listening group on Zoom ("The Hot Club of New York"), had planned to join the reading. When he attempted to log on for the performance of the Dario Fo play, William saw his Zoom Identity—"Hot Club"—and, assuming he was a potentially scandalous impostor, refused him access. The show had to go on, but where was Matthew? It was several precious minutes before the dust settled.