“All that everybody seems to think about is sex. Sex, sex, sex. And if it’s on your mind all the time, it can’t be a very good thing, can it?,” says the frustrated lattermost character in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (at the Signature Center through March 22), which adds a few songs to the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker that proved a defining parable of its era, albeit one that was almost instantly vaporized by the mallet of time. The movie was blazingly contemporary for 1969, embarrassingly dated fifteen years later. With its consciousness-raising groups, its groovy clothes (the beaded necklaces on men were almost as horrifying as the casual infidelity), its self-actualization talk, and its suggestion that a few endangered relationships might be salvaged by a nice healing orgy, it turned out to be so morally, pragmatically, and aesthetically erroneous that it was willfully forgotten in the years after it received four Academy Award nominations and proved one of the biggest hits of the year.

Or perhaps there is another reason the film disappeared from the collective memory: it was absolutely correct, and its satire was so dead-on it hurt. By the time the sort of people depicted in the film were guiding the popular culture, they wished to forget they had ever participated in or promoted the era of “swingers”—a euphemism for normalized infidelity that was, for a few years, the talk of the slick magazines and the randy chat