Shevek's childhood friend Tirin writes a satirical play about an Urrasti who smuggles himself onto Annares and tries to impose a capitalist system on the planet. The play lands Tirin in trouble—audiences interpret it as an immoral work, and the criticism, Shevek speculates, breaks Tirin's spirit. By the time the reader learns of Tirin’s play, they have already witnessed Shevek’s ill-fated attempt to become part of Urrasti society. In the play, the self-styled “Owner of Annares” attempts to practice capitalism in an anarchist society and is met with indifference to humorous results. On Urras, Shevek tries to enlighten the Urrasti to the values of Odonian society, but the response from his upper-class audiences ranges from polite disinterest to willful disagreement. 

When Shevek and Takver discuss the possibility of Shevek's journey, he recalls the play to argue for the absurdity of the plan, and the narrative thus employs dramatic irony: 

“What a crazy idea! Like Tirin’s play, only backwards. I’m to go subvert the anarchists. . . . Well, it would at least prove to them that Anarres exists. They talk with us on the radio, but I don’t think they really believe in us. In what we are.”

The reader, of course, knows perfectly well what Shevek's future holds.

In the play, the “Owner of Annares” is incapable of copulating with a willing partner, held back by his ideas of propriety and financial compensation. He wants to pay her for the act, and she rejects his payment:

And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she’s just wide open and ready, but he can’t do it until he’s given her his gold nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn’t want them. That was funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he’d leap up like he’d been bitten, saying, ‘I must not! It is not moral! It is not good business!'

This scene in the play resembles, in the inverse, Shevek’s disastrous attempt to copulate with Vea. Shevek is incapable of understanding Vea’s protests (invoking her reputation in high society and her husband’s disapproval) because they hinge on her identity as an Urrasti woman, still a foreign concept to Shevek. He has succumbed to an Urrasti way of thinking and sees Vea as a sexual commodity, but, due to his unfamiliarity with Urrasti sexual norms, he cannot reconcile her flirtations with her resistance and is capable of understanding only the former. Earlier, in an attempt to understand Vea’s conspicuous sexuality, he wonders if she might be a sex worker. Shevek can only comprehend the high degree of sexuality that Vea displays in terms of possession, not just because of Urrasti influence, but also because of his own Annaresti mentality.

The scene in the play is humorous, whereas the scene of the assault is disturbing. Parallels between the play and the scene of the assault help to elucidate the scene’s complexities and many possible levels of analysis. On one level of analysis, Shevek has succumbed to the indulgent, egoistic Urrasti lifestyle and lusts after Vea in an attempt to possess her, seeing her only as an object in the way a typical Urrasti would view women. On another level of analysis, Vea and Shevek’s relationship reveals Shevek’s latent sexism, which is itself a product of Annaresti society. The dramatic irony that results from the reader's understanding of Shevek's future adds tension to the scene and reveals the extent of Shevek's own ignorance about his shortcomings.