All this is placeholder. As a young wife kindles a love affair with a society gentleman, who happens to be sleeping with his parlor maid behind closed doors, her husband rendezvouses with a girl from town, who carries on with a bohemian poet after night-fall, though he really longs for another… On and on, partners switch: they meet, bed, and move on to the next. La Ronde, a play told in ten illicit dalliances, is a muscular investigation of sexual response, the performativity of arousal, gratification, kink, trauma, and the identity politics of the bedroom.