The Hotel Play
The price? Well, suit yourself—but I know a local fellow who sold one of these jars to a pathologist for twice the price that you'd be paying. The pathologist was a very sick man;—his doctor had given him only two weeks to live! But when he got the jar, he re-sold it within two hours to a counterfeiter for twice as much again and bought himself an artificial lung and an artificial neck.
The Hotel Play (1970) by Wallace Shawn
At a tropical hotel with unusual features (e.g., a room with four bathrooms for the price of three), dozens and dozens of confused characters briefly cross paths, sometimes finding something new, sometimes not. The only constant is the mysterious Clerk, who seems to be one step ahead of everyone, though even he is not quite all there.
The Hotel Play was not Shawn's first produced play, but was written earlier than the rest. It is nearly impossible to produce as intended (see sidebar).
Notes
From the Author's Notes to the Dramatists Play Service edition:
[T]he play is a kind of strange dream, and I would very much like the audience to see in front of them an apparently infinite array of strange human beings ... I would much prefer to see it done by seventy or eighty actors ... with each person playing a single part only. .... [T]he play is indeed fun in a way and even a bit farcical, but I quite sincerely believe that a more satisfying time will be had by both performers and audience if the style in which the play is performed is generally understated and truthful ...
While there's plenty of purely verbal humor in Shawn's other work, The Hotel Play shows him briefly trying out other comic styles while staying within his own peculiar dream logic, including farce (a woman's lover worries about whether her husband, brother-in-law, father, and grandfather might find out; they all crash through the door the next second) and minimalist slapstick (a "whoops" during a brief blackout leads to a ridiculously blood-drenched corpse).