Naughty Bits: Ten Short Plays About Sex – 12 April 2026

William Andrew Jones’s ten short plays about sex, entitled Naughty Bits explores dirty jokes/language in several contexts where people feel sex might not belong, yet cannot help but arouse sexual thoughts. There are naughty bits in all of life’s bits—it’s only natural to feel them in your own naughty bits. At times, the shorter pieces felt a little neglected, and the pieces in the second act seemed more profound because they were longer and allowed the audience to linger with the characters. In general, the play struggled with establishing the next thing after a performance finished, and it took a little bit longer for my brain to fully accept each successive thing because I didn’t feel quite done with the previous one. A sound designer would have really helped with that, as music that transitions to the next piece gives time to clear the palate.

The show begins with “Bubble Wrap”, a monologue about the satisfaction of completing bodily functions, such as urinating and defecating. It then moves into “Happy Hamlet”, which takes a well known (yet frequently misunderstood) Shakespearean monologue and substitutes early modern English words for sex terms, playing on the idea that people think about sex when they drift off in situations they don’t understand, as well as acknowledging how much of highly lauded, immortalized writing is really about sex. After that, “Hotel Bourgogne” spoke to the sexualization of anything foreign/exotic through questions about small penises, and “Princess Jeralyn” called out the weird, dark sexual themes sometimes found in children’s stories. “Dirty Words” followed, evoking the lack of difference between the high level words of academia and the multisyllabic terms for sexual behaviors and STI’s. “Evelyn Earwax” was the last piece before intermission, and it mocked the concept of polite society, postulating the polite society is rife with scandal and everyone knows it.

Act two began with “Down the Chimney”, a brilliantly written story of a sexy Santa Claus, speaking on both costumes and holidays. Then, “The Doctor is In” spoke of sex without professional boundaries in repeated situations of characters sleeping with their therapists. “Dorothy Parkers” introduced a verbal foreplay wordplay game, reminding the audience that everyone defines foreplay a little differently while also showing off the human ability to turn every word into something sexual. Finally, “Ziggy and The Lord” shows that even Jesus and religion are not spheres immune to sexual thoughts and suggestions.

My favorite piece was “The Doctor is In”. I enjoyed the absurdity of therapists sleeping with their patients, and thought it was quite clever since sex is a very normal thing to talk about in therapy and because sex or desiring inappropriate sex has long been deemed a cause of psychological ailments (ex. Oedipal Complex). It also cheekily raised the question of how high up the chain of authority corruption can go. It’s wrong to sleep with your therapist, but did you ever consider that they might be sleeping with their therapist? And so on and so forth.

A piece that I think deserves a little more thought is “Dirty Words.” The actors confidently spoke all of the lines, but they didn’t add much nuance to help the audience understand what the capriciously protracted verbiage was intended to elucidate, thus germinating ennui and discombobulation among the audience. At times it felt like the actors did not understand what they were saying, and so the audience couldn’t either. Here and there, there were sentences that gave some familiar words as hints, but you had to hang on every word to catch them.

Overall, Naughty Bits is an unfettered acknowledgment that, like it or not, the human brain jumps to sex in situations that society has decided shouldn’t be sexual. Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism, perhaps a desire to perpetuate the species, and perhaps something higher order with a correlation to love. This piece examines how everything from a sound to a children’s book to a dictionary to a holiday to Jesus Christ himself can be sexual, reminding us that we are creatures with needs who can interject sexual desire just about anywhere. Despite the comedic packaging, Naughty Bits sends a message: it is okay to see/want sex everywhere. You are not the first and only person to draw whatever parallels or incidental preoccupations are in your head. The next step is being okay with talking about them—but maybe don’t try them out on your therapist so you don’t lose your best source of support.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Andrea Alton/Alton PR.