Short One Act Play
The Library
Dramatis Personae:
A love-struck boy
A girl
Dr. James D’Iago
4 Security men
ACT ONE: The library. Boy and Girl present.
BOY: All my heart is torn asunder by your cold, indifferent heart! Why must you toy with me like some cruel seagull toys with a lamb’s eyeball? Can’t you see I’m dying for love? Can’t you see I’m slain? I’m almost dead now but I just have time for a few more reproachments with my last breaths.
(Sinks to knees)
Oh, girl, so frosty in your looks! So wintry in your heart – the icicles on your wintry one are as daggers unto my soft purplish one. Look! What have you here? “The Waves”. Such a chilly title.
(Shudders)
GIRL: Look, I don’t know who you are, but if you don’t go away immediately I am calling the police.
BOY: Don’t pretend it never happened! You can’t deny it! You caught my eye over by Tolstoy and at Byron you
shyly smiled recognition of our twin-souls destiny entiwined together in both soulful and bodily ways.
GIRL: Eew! No! You were staring at me like a madman at Tolstoy, and by Byron I was grimacing recognition of an utter looney. Grimacing.
BOY: But I saw you weep with the ache of desire outside the Ladies!
GIRL: My contact lens fell out. Look, I won’t tell you again – piss off, you freak!
BOY: Oh ho-ho, you saucy minx. I was reading about this “playing hard to get” convention of young ladies over in the Dewey 100s yesterday. Dewey! Just as your eyes are dewy; 100s! Just as you’re 75 years younger than. Oh it’s all falling into place!
(Reeling for joy)
I am revived by your freshness in these complex games of love! You have saved my life! Come! Let’s go to a meadow
I know and walk together talking of tears and sorrows and unloved rabbits whom nature has cursed with crooked,
laughable ears, but whose hearts are all of gold!
GIRL: Hey, let go of me!
(A brief struggle)
Security! Security!
ENTER SECURITY AND SYRINGE WIELDING DOCTOR
(A scuffle)
EXEUNT SECURITY AND BOY, SLUMPED.
DOCTOR: Don’t worry miss, this fellow is known to us. He won’t be bothering you any more. He won’t be bothering
any young ladies any more.
GIRL (startled): Oh hey, look! Don’t be too hard on him. I mean, he was a pain but… Where are you taking him anyway? What was in that syringe?
DOCTOR: “Anti-Love Potion Number 6.” Developed by myself et al. for use on earnest, sensitive males in the Arts Faculty. By eventually getting all the girls about 10 years after graduation when they’ve stopped being so insufferable, they perpetuate their kind and make it harder for the progeny of young male scientists and computer engineers to be born. Society needs quantity-surveyors and business-managers, not art.
GIRL: What do you me…? – Blimey, did you really just say “et al.”?
(Aside) What a tosser!
Wait, Doctor – what is your name? You’re not with the university are you? Who are you? Doctor! DOCTOR…!
EXIT DOCTOR LEAVING LIBRARY DOORS SWINGING… The GIRL LOOKS DOWN AND FINDS A CARD ON TOP OF HER BOOKS.
Girl (reading):
“Call me! Dr.James D’Iago. PhD (psyc). Entrepeneur and Outstanding Graduate in the Department of Applied Psychiatry (2006) “More looneys binned than with medication alone!” (The Daily Mail)
Are you a successful but dull man struggling to get a date? Call for reasonable rates on Arts-student removal from the gene pool. Get ‘em now, while they’re easy to institutionalize! Also binning enthusiastic science-faculty males, charismatic math-boy majors and rogue cool engineers, starting in July.”
(Turns card over. Reads)
“Dinner tonight? 8pm. My place – Basement flat, 2 Creip Street. Soundproofed for our privacy, heh-heh. Bring wine.”
(Girl flings card away)
Jesus!
THE END
June 11th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
good lord, where have i been? you’ve been posting with a frenzy only heretofore seen that one time when someone else did the same thing.
in the stage production i would like to play the doctor, if i may.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Othello turns into Falstaff somewhere in the middle of that scene. The doctor is definitely a deus ex machina.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Males in Arts find it much easier when they can combine with Law, there is much less flim-flam and both parties to the transaction tend to know where they lay on the land.
But I find it a bit rich, when the same people get all arm wavy about arranged marriage in India.
While an evening when the Med students enter the bar is akin to a wildlife programme, not sure which one. Those bears in Alaska come to mind, for it is more or less how the med students go through the freshers. While Croc’s do stuff their kill under some submerged log.
Dr. Jimmy James. Good one
June 12th, 2008 at 12:37 am
W^F was all that about? Sorry about my mitous having to deal wher I am rhe proseate adn tje 4ntp ren tears long molhy.
Oh puuo’ami eald pf then hihrmdm had had bhoo.\Many d=faime up nowt eoud nhea tmy fa00wms them dictate all so ksj,
Me nO need to speep noe,
June 12th, 2008 at 2:52 am
“Dr. James D?Iago. PhD (psyc).”
I suspect he’s not what he says he is. Using Dr before, and Phd after your name is not proper. It’s as if he said he was Mr. James D?Iago. Esq., it’s not the right ‘form’. Maybe English is not his mother tongue. Perhaps he brings these arts students to his ‘rooms’ where he reads to them from slim volumes? It all sounds a bit Cold War Cambridge to me. Put a tail on him, he’s a rat.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:42 am
When I was an undergrad there was a dude who was a serial masturbator in the stacks. Creepy.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Kara, sure! get to work on your sinister glint. This dr. must have a sinister glint.
Nanas, the girl’s a Rosalindish figure, but at this stage, the boy still has a little Bottom about him, I’m afraid.
Vincent, students in bars are a lot like a nature programme. Sexed up rabbits trying to get lucky, mostly. Nothing wrong with that though. The most natural thing in the world for young bucks and does.
Me, shut up you drunken bint. Didn’t I tell you that last Stella was a mistake? But do you ever listen to me, me? I don’t know why I waste my breath sometimes, I really don’t.
Conan, He’s a great big showoff. I expect that’s it. One that’s finding it hard to get laid, even at college. I see him more as a reader of instruction manuals for toasters etc. than a slim volume chap.
Medbh, eeeew! How was anybody supposed to be able to get a book out knowing a thing like that? They shgould have a sign up in libraries, NO FOOD OR DRINK ALLOWED, AND ABSOLUTELY NO WANKING EITHER. Eeeeeew!
Conan
June 12th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Eh, yes? No Dewey classification here, honest.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Yeah right, methinks the lady doth protest too much. You love it. You all do. We doctors have the gift and you just can’t stand it. Stop fighting baby, I’ve a couple of bottles of asti spumanti chilling in the sink back at the pad and a Triumph TR6 to get us there.
Sorted.
Mega.
Result!
June 12th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
What exactly is unusual about finding it hard to get laid in college? I suppose legends were laid freuquently or said they were.
Non-legends, I prefer to call us domestiques, we’re with the hero in your play. I like his apporach. And don’t tell me now he’s not heroic.
June 12th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Conan, darling, you could classify me any day.
Docs, the word spumanti has seduced me. You’re a smooth-tongued devil and no mistake. I’ll be right over…
Sniffly, no! Legends was yesterday. Today it’s wet Romeos and evil Iagos. Romeo will be heroic but it will take him 10-15 years for him to get there. He needs more cragginess and a bit of living under his belt.