A Thought in Three Parts

A Thought In Three Parts

By Wallace Shawn

Directed by Hallie Cooper-Novack

November 17th at 8pm
November 18th and
November 19th
at 8 and 11 pm

PLEASE NOTE: A Thought in Three Parts contains nudity, strong language, adult content, and other enticements.

What is the relationship of sex and intimacy? What is the relationship of sex and violence? What about intimacy and violence? When we're seeking one of these three, why do we sometimes wind up with one of the others?

This controversial play by Wallace Shawn (Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever) – which, due to its explicit nature, has only received one other full production in the United States since its writing in 1976 – explores these questions in the form of three short plays that come together to form a fractured and complex "thought."

Wallace Shawn is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a noted stage and screen actor. His plays The Designated Mourner and The Fever have recently been produced as films, and his translation of Threepenny Opera was recently performed on Broadway. He is co-author of My Dinner with Andre and the author of The Fever and Aunt Dan and Lemon, among other works. His friends call him Wally.

From Wallace Shawn's "Afterword" to A Thought in Three Parts:

Why is sex interesting to write about?  It’s still shocking, after all these years - isn't that incredible?  Even after all these years, most bourgeois people, including me, still walk around with an image of themselves in their heads that doesn't include – well – that. ... The fact is that when I form a picture of myself, I see myself doing the sorts of things that humans do and only humans do - things like hailing a taxi, going to a restaurant, voting for a candidate in an election, or placing receipts in various piles and adding them up. But if I'm unexpectedly reminded that my soul and body are capable of being totally swept up in a pursuit and an activity that pigs, flies, wolves, lions and tigers also engage in, my normal picture of myself is violently disrupted. 

...Sex is really an extraordinary meeting of the meaningful and the meaningless. The big toe, for example, is one part of the human body, human flesh shaped and constructed in a particular way. The penis is another part of the body, located not too far away from the big toe and built out of fundamentally the same materials. The act of sex, the particular shapes of the penis and the vagina, are the way they are because natural selection has made them that way. There may be an adaptive value to each particular choice that evolution made, but from our point of view as human beings living our lives, the evolutionary explanations are unknown, and the various details present themselves to us as completely arbitrary. It can only be seen as funny that men buy magazines containing pictures of breasts, but not magazines with pictures of knees or elbows. It can only be seen as funny that demagogues give speeches denouncing men who insert their penises into other men's anuses - and then go home to insert their own penises into their wives' vaginas! (One might have thought it obvious that either both of these acts are completely outrageous, or neither of them is.) And yet the interplay and permutations of the apparently meaningless, the desire to penetrate anus or vagina, the glimpse of the naked breast, the hope of sexual intercourse or the failure of it, lead to joy, grief, happiness or desperation for the human creature.

Perhaps it is the power of sex that has taught us to love the meaningless and thereby turn it into the meaningful. Apparently, amazingly, the love of what is arbitrary (which one could alternately describe as the love of reality) is something we human beings are capable of feeling (and perhaps even what we call the love of the beautiful is simply a particular way of exercising this remarkable ability). So it might not be absurd to say that if you love the body of another person, if you love another person, if you love a meadow, if you love a horse, if you love a painting or a piece of music or the sky at night, then the power of sex is flowing through you. 

It is often noted that writers like to write about conflict, and of course conflict is built into the theme of sex. A story about a person who wants to have a plate of spaghetti might be interesting, but a story about a person who wants to have another person - now, that is potentially even more interesting, because the person who is desired may not want to participate. But even leaving aside the conflict involved in the fact that people's desires are often at cross purposes, sex has always been known to be such a powerful force that fragile humanity can't help but be terribly nervous in front of it, so powerful barriers have been devised to control it - taboos of all varieties, first of all, and then all the emotions subsumed under the concepts of jealousy and possessiveness, possessiveness being a sort of anticipatory form of jealousy.  

...Perhaps it would be a good thing if people saw themselves as a part of nature, connected to the environment in which they live. Sex can be a very humbling, equalizing force. It's often been noted that naked people do not wear medals, and weapons are forbidden inside the pleasure garden.  ... Sex really is a nation of its own. Those whose allegiance is given to sex at a certain moment withdraw their loyalty temporarily from other powers. It's a symbol of the possibility that we might all defect for one reason or another from the obedient columns in which we march.

...

The contemplation of nudity or sex could tend to bring up the alarming idea that at any moment human passions might rise up and topple the world we know.

Three Thoughts about Wallace Shawn:

"[Youth Hostel, from A Thought in three Parts] is the only successful piece of pornography in the modern theatre... and it's also sexy and very funny. Wally's imagination is completely distinctive. He is very provocative, and like all true provocateurs he doesn't fully understand his own provocation. He brings you what he sees to be the truth, from his own subconscious."

- David Hare, playwright

"Wallace Shawn, the most underrated playwright in America... keeps questioning the way we live."

- Neil LaBute, playwright

“Wallace Shawn’s career as a playwright has been uncompromisingly devoted to proving, again and again, that theater is an ideal medium for exploring difficult matters of great consequence. [H]is dramatic work [is] challenging, startling, unsettling, sensual, mind-and-soul expanding, indispensible.”

- Tony Kushner, playwright