A Thought in Three Parts
It's strange, there's nothing, there isn't anything I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't do for pleasure. I'd stick a hot poker up my ass if I thought I would like it.
A Thought in Three Parts (1976) by Wallace Shawn
Summer Evening: A young couple is staying at a foreign hotel. She loses herself in cold, sensual daydreams, while he tries to express his frustrated longing for her and fails.
The Youth Hostel: Dick, Helen, Bob and Judy are sitting around with nothing to do. Bob, who's never had a girlfriend, asks to see Judy's breasts. This sets off a wildly pornographic series of confrontations where no one can avoid saying or doing the first thing that comes to mind.
Mr Frivolous: A man eats breakfast and delivers a brief, dreamy monologue to a lost lover.
Notes
What is the thought made up of these parts? The only obvious through-line is desire, for sex and for connections: unattainable in Summer Evening, absent but childishly dreamed of in Mr Frivolous, and compulsively pursued in The Youth Hostel.
In Hostel, the stage directions as written are not only X-rated, but more or less physically impossible outside the world of movies (it's hard to find a male stage actor who can have three plentiful orgasms in ten minutes, on cue). The piece clearly follows the rules of the typical porn movie, in that no one can enter a room without ending up having sex, and most of the sex ends up being accidentally witnessed by someone else who must then join in. But the dialogue and the emotional action could hardly be less titillating: all of the characters are subject to wild mood swings and are generally unbearably disappointed by everything they try, and when someone actually manages to have fun, the mood is deflated by comically flat dialogue ("Oh, boy—this is really enjoyable!").
The 1977 London production was visited by a vice squad, and led to calls in the House of Lords to stop government funding for the Institute of Contemporary Arts.