At first glance, Big Thick Rod might look like a play filled with penis jokes and double entendres. Which it is. But it's also something more. The play's outrageousness, its seeming silliness, serve to heighten the effectiveness of its treatment of much darker themes. Below, we go deeper with Big Thick Rod.

Rod goes deeper

Dramaturgical Context | Thematic Issues | W.H. Auden | Larger Significance

Thematic Issues

At heart, BIG THICK ROD is a consideration about exploitation, using sexuality as a means to get at this larger idea. We see Cricket exploiting Jerome and Rod in the pursuit of both of her sexual needs and financial profit. In addition, however, we see Cricket exploited as well; her affections and desire are tossed aside by her once caring husband, replaced by his quest to use her to show off and improve his own status.

Wood prefaces the play with three quotations, one of which is by W. H. Auden, and seems to sum up a great deal of what is at stake in this piece: "Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods." This quotation, from Auden’s prose work “Hic Et Ille,” included in the collection The Dyer’s Hand, reminds its reader of the reality of every relationship.

We all want to believe that relationships are symbiotic, and that each party benefits equally from the partnerships. Quite often, however, this is not in the case, and one individual in the pairing is being used in some manner, often to the benefit of the other. When one is rendered useless by his/her partner, he/she is also often rendered obsolete as well, and tossed aside for a newer, more profitable partnership.

Dramaturgical Context | Thematic Issues | W.H. Auden | Larger Significance