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KIMBERLY: Which building is the library?

CURTAIN

• • •

SCENE 2: DR. JEKYLL’S LABORATORY. TEN O’CLOCK AT NIGHT. A PAINTED BACKDROP WITH AN OPERATING WINDOW AND DOOR IN IT.

[At the rise: Library clock strikes ten. Dog howls. DR. JEKYLL is alone and going through hell, trying to think of something really good to discover. The theater is within hailing distance.]

JEKYLL: Gosh darn it to heck. Let’s put on the old thinking cap, and cogitate. Jesus, this is really a doozy, trying to think up something nobody ever thought up before. Everything I think of has been thought of.

[JERRY appears in the window. He is dejected.]

JERRY: Dr. Jekyll—looks like you’re going to have to save the college singlehanded. We can’t think up a story.

JEKYLL: Things are none too brisk in the lab, my boy. Why is it that every time you need a Nobel prize-type idea, you never can think of one?

JERRY: I’m sending over some inspiration for you. Hope it helps.

JEKYLL: Inspiration?

JERRY: You’ll see.

[JERRY exits. LEGHORN knocks on the door.]

JEKYLL: Entrez.

[LEGHORN enters with a bottle containing a green chemical]

LEGHORN: I wonder if you’d run an analysis on this for me. It’s some kind of dope one of my competitors is feeding his chickens. I’d like to know what’s in it. I’ll pay you well.

JEKYLL: That’s like asking Albert Einstein to balance your checkbook.

LEGHORN: He couldn’t tie his own shoelaces. Everybody knows that. [Spotting a row of bottles] A half gallon of LSD! Amphetamines! Barbiturates! Quaaludes! Vitamin E. What are you doing with this stuff?

JEKYLL: Taken from students at different times. LEGHORN: No wonder they think they’re so talented. I’ll give you five hundred bucks if you can give me an analysis of this stuff before I get out of here—tomorrow at noon. That’s only in the event, of course, that your Nobel prize project falls through. Good night.

[LEGHORN exits. JEKYLL sniffs the sample.]

JEKYLL: Whoooeee! That’ll put hair on your chest! Smells like a mixture of crème de menthe and athlete’s foot to me.

[Sally knocks on the door, calls through it seductively.]

SALLY: Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Jekyll.

JEKYLL: Entrez.

[SALLY enters at the head of a line of coeds in diaphanous nightgowns. They have come to inspire him. KIMBERLY is among them.]

JEKYLL: [Petrified, retreating] What kind of a frame-up is this? I’ve never had anything to do with sex in my life!

SALLY: This isn’t sex.

JEKYLL: It isn’t?

SALLY: We’re Muses. Jerry had us dress up like Muses, and told us to come over and inspire you.

JEKYLL: I’d hate to have to explain that to the state police. SALLY: You just relax and enjoy it.

[The music starts up, and the girls do a sort of here-we-go-gathering-nuts-in-May dance with and around JEKYLL, tickling him, blowing in his ears, decking him with flowers, and so on. The dance ends with JEKYLL in a sensationally compromising position.

WHITEFEET enters without knocking, and is scandalized.]

WHITEFEET: I am revolted! I am disillusioned! I am scandalized!

JEKYLL: It isn’t what it looked like.

WHITEFEET: It looked like a full professor playing here-we-go-gathering-nuts-in-May.

SALLY: It was our fault, Dr. Whitefeet.

WHITEFEET: What do you foolish virgins know? You couldn’t find your own behinds with both hands.

KIMBERLY: [Proudly, innocently] I just found mine.

WHITEFEET: [Pointing to JEKYLL] There is the man I hold responsible/He is not only a Dr. Jekyll—he is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

SALLY: [Echoing wonderingly] Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. [More firmly] Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde! That’s it!

JEKYLL: Who’s Mr. Hyde?

SALLY: That’s the story for our musical! Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—it’s never been done. Wait till I tell Jerry!

WHITEFEET: Just a minute! What about this moral outrage I saw here?

SALLY: [On her way out, leading the other coeds] Buster—when you peed away the endowment on cocoa futures, you ceased to exist as a moral leader for me. You don’t have the brains God gave a clay pigeon.

[SALLY and the coeds exit.]

WHITEFEET: