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, but the playwright considers it absolutely essential because it will give the audience the shock of recognition.

By that, Barnstable means that the audience will know that this is not going to be a play that glamorizes or plays it cute with the way people behave. Anyone viewing that naked actor and hearing that line will realize that this play's author has experienced life as it is, will identify the scene with something from his own experience and so credit the play…. [Barnstable feels that] the theater should come of age and treat life as it is lived, not hide behind stage-prop fig leaves….

Having thus prepared his audience, playwright Anderson proceeds to present variations on the theme. If you have accepted his premise, the mention of menopause, masturbation and contraception will provoke in you the shock of recognition and the readiness to have private matters explored in and through a public forum. (p. 1048)