Robert Anderson (author) Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert Graham Kemper

Critical Essay by Robert Graham Kemper

Sex is the theme that links the four short plays written by Robert Anderson and presented under the over-all title You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running. Actually, Anderson has written three plays, the fourth (or, rather, the first) being an introduction and a guide to the others. How one responds to the initial play will set one's pattern of interpretation for the others. I do not like to brag, but I got the message of the first play, and therefore found the others warm and humorous insights into the grandeur and misery of human sexuality.

In the first play—"The Shock of Recognition," which is what the author solicits from his audience throughout the evening—a fictional playwright, Jack Barnstable, must convince his producer, Joe Silver, that his new drama demands that a male actor appear on the stage in the nude…. The producer wants the scene eliminated,...
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