Plays by
Gary Noland
available from FREELAND PUBLICATIONS
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FP122 LOVE THEORY 101 (Op. 90)
a
comedy in verse
in four acts
for six actors & extras
duration: ca. 90 minutes–two hours
(2007)
$30.00
LOVE
THEORY 101
by GARY NOLAND
A Play in
Four Acts
for Six
Actors
Op. 90
Cover illustration copyright @2007 by Gary Noland. All Rights Reserved
Prologue:
Chief Inspector Helga
Thornsnag of the Pimpleton PD (wife of Perfessor Druben J. Xeroxburger)
introduces the audience to the location of her precinct (and setting of this
play)—the little known metropolis of Pimpleton, New Jersey. She tries to enlist
the audience’s help in tracking down a prolific serial killer (or killers?) who
has been haunting the environs of Pimpleton State Luniversity.
Act One.
Setting: lecture hall at
Pimpleton State Luniversity. It is the first day of the term and four students
have enrolled in a seminar on “love theory” taught by Perfessor Xeroxburger
(incumbent of the Raskolnikov Chair of “Appled Social Ethics and Graces”). He
gives tedious lectures consisting of highfalutin jargon that is impossible to
decipher. Dweebaldo van Boofus is baffled by the lectures, while Phisto McGroin
(a fartsucking teacher’s pet) and Goldie Gobbledygoo (a bimbo) “go with the
flow,” as it were, by pretending as though they grok what the perfessor is
spewing. They even ask prepared questions employing verbage that appears (at
least superficially) to pertain to the topics at hand. This encourages the inscrutably
indecipherable discussions that follow each lecture. When Abigail Oinkbladder
appears on the scene (late for her first day of class), Dweebaldo falls
headlong for her.
Act Two.
Perfessor Xeroxburger has an
affair with Goldie. By now the audience has been led to believe (thru various
red herrings) that he is the killer. Helga calls him persistently on his
cellphone to remind him of various trivial domestic duties she wants him to
perform. He is haunted by his conscience in the form of a chorus of viragoes
who nag him to the point of madness. In the meantime, Dweebaldo plans to put
Perfessor Xeroxburger to the test in class by interjecting names of
non-existent scholars into the discussion following the perfessor’s lecture. He
also decides to declare his pash for Abigail.
Act Three.
Phisto notices that Goldie
has gone missing and begins to worry that something terrible has happened to
her. In the meantime, being the ardent womanizer he is, he beats Dweebaldo to
the punch, so to speak, by getting involved in a torrid affair with Abigail.
Phisto and Abigail inadvertently vex Dweebaldo by flaunting the highly charged
sexual nature of their relationship before him with an insufferably rude song
and dance schtick. In despite of feeling utterly dejected, Dweebaldo manages to
lead the discussion after the perfessor’s lecture and to insidiously interject
the names of non-existent scholars thereinto. Not only does Perfessor
Xeroxburger fail to call Dweebaldo’s bluff but he has the gall to inweave those
very names into his own wordy
discourse. At this point Dweebaldo is overwhelmingly convinced that the
perfessor is an impostor and (with axes aplenty to grind) makes it his singular
mission to expose him for what he is. Towards the middle of the act, Dweebaldo
finds himself alone with Abigail—the love of his life—and verbously gallivants
therewith. However, he soon realizes that she has been indoctrinated by the
poisonous theoretical jargon to which she has been subjected at the academy, a
consequence of which she has inadvertently assimilated a psychotically twisted
notion in regard to the time-honored rituals of amour courtois. When Dweebaldo proffers her a lavish bouquet of
roses, she rejects it, misconstructing his overture as a monstrously offensive
form of sexual harassment. She threatens to report him to the Ad Board and get
him expelled from the academy for what she misperceives to be a heinously
criminal act.
Act Four.
Goldie wakes up tied to a
torture rack in a veritable chamber of horrors. Perfessor Xeroxburger, dolled
up in his wife’s police uniform (fishnets and all), whips Goldie senseless with
a cat-o’-nine-tails. We are led to believe at this point that Goldie thinks the
perfessor is actually Helga Thornsnag and that the perfessor himself is the serial
killer his wife is hunting down. However, we learn soon enough that the two of
them are merely acting out a bizarre sexual fantasy. In the final scene of Act
Four (which is the longest), Perfessor Xeroxburger meets with his students in
his office after dinnertime. Dweebaldo arrives armed with proof positive that
the perfessor is a world-class charlatan. At the point when he confronts the
perfessor with the fact that his scholarly sources are phony, Helga
materializes, followed by Abigail (who is all spruced up in the hopes of
seducing the perfessor to improve her grades). Goldie makes a surprise
appearance shortly thereafter and the play’s denouement occurs when Perfessor
Xeroxburger confesses to everyone (after being cornered by Dweebaldo) that he
hasn’t a tittle of talent in his alleged field of expertise. “How can I teach
about love,” he says, “when I can’t even feel love for my fellowmen?” Shortly thereafter, Helga is
accused by Dweebaldo of being the very killer whose crimes she is officially
investigating. After the pressure mounts, Helga shoots her husband, who dies on
the spot. Although the students wrestle the gun from her grip, she manages
nevertheless to escape. We are left with the four students mourning the loss of
their beloved teacher (charlatan or no), after which they solemnly pledge to
carry his torch to the “next generation” and “spule out his jargon to inspirit
veneration.”
FP124 NOTHING IS MORE (Op.
92)
a comedy in verse with music
in six acts
for six actors & extras
duration: ca. four–five hours
(2008)
$70.00
Cover illustration of "Nothing is More" by Gary Noland
Copyright © 2008 by Gary Noland • All Rights Reserved
Nothing is More: Synopsis
Act One.
Purvel Schlignatz is formally presented with his
doctoral degree but is warned by Beverly Lovebucks (the incumbent president of
Pimpleton Luniversity) that there are few worthwhile jobs available. Thus she
recommends he pursue an even higher degree called a “stool” to increase his job
opportunities. He acquiesces and finds himself amongst a small but elite group
of students pursuing absurdly arcane areas of study such as “astromusicology,”
“feline transgender studies,” “primaeval linguistics,” and so on. One stool
candidate, Phangbang Bonation, is a world-renowned artiste who makes preposterous claims about his accomplishments.
He boasts an unrivalled technical mastery of virtually every imaginable
artistic idiom, including the visual arts, film-making, music composition,
novel writing, poetry, architecture, sculpting and whatnot, the main loophole
being that he is the progenitor of a submicrominimalist aesthetic known as
“Nadaism,” which espouses doing nothing (i.e., short of making outrageous pronunciamentos regarding one’s
achievements) and calling it “art.” Purvel, who tries to keep an open mind, is
eventually persuaded by his friend and fellow stool candidate, Pelvin
Penisovich, that Phangbang is a crafty impostor who needs must be discredited
at all costs (if not outright eliminated from the face of the planet!).
Act Two.
Purvel falls in love with Kitty Walters (another stool
candidate) and woos her. Dronah Stackbut, a student of astromusicology and
Pelvin’s lover, gets seduced by Phangbang and drops Pelvin like a hot potato.
Act Three.
Purvel learns, to his heartbreaking disappointment,
that Kitty—the love of his life—has been seduced by Phangbang. This solidifies
his resolve to go along with Pelvin’s iniquitous schemes to destroy Phangbang
and his “Nadaist” movement.
Act Four.
Pelvin and Purvel, having learned that the Louvre is
planning an exposition of Phangbang’s “ghost paintings” (which requires that
the museum remove every single artifact from its floors and walls), ascertain
that Phangbang has offered the Louvre’s curators the storm cellar of his condo
in Tampa as a storage facility for the museum’s most invaluable treasures.
Pelvin and Purvel break into Phangbang’s storm cellar and deface several of the
Louvre’s most noted paintings, including the Mona Lisa, in the hopes that Phangbang will be blamed for it and
that the ensuing scandal will not only destroy Phangbang’s reputation but land
him in the cooler as well. While rummaging about in Phangbang’s storm cellar,
Purvel finds a box of Phangbang’s personal effects, in which he discovers some
bona fide opuses attributed to Phangbang—an ambitious choral composition titled
the “B-Flat Minor Mass” and a novel of Proustian dimensions titled “Gilligans
Cake.” Upon perusing these items, his view of Phangbang’s artistic oeuvre takes
a 180-degree turn.
Act Five.
Upon realizing that Phangbang is actually one of the
greatest artistic geniuses of his generation and that he is merely hiding his
talents under the cloak of Nadaism as an oblique survival tactic, Purvel is
stricken by guilt for having been led astray by Pelvin in his malicious
attempts to discredit Phangbang. However, in an ironic twist of fate, Phangbang
is melodiously praised by the critics for his “revolutionary” new concept, for
which they—in their manic obsession for affixing labels to mere whims—coin the
term “revisitationism.” “Revisitationism” is defined as an aesthetic in which
established art objects (i.e., original icons) are “revisited” thru
vandalization. An example of this new aesthetic would be to jackhammer the
genitals off of Michelangelo’s David.
(An infamous precursor thereto is geologist Laszlo Toth’s 1972 hammer attack on
the Virgin of Michelangelo’s Pietà.)
In a final showdown, Pelvin and Phangbang are selected as finalists for the
prestigious Modigger Prize—a competition that awards its winner a stipend of
five hundred thousand dollars.
Act Six.
Although it is initially believed to be a foregone
conclusion that Phangbang will win the Modigger Prize, when he admits that his
“Nadaist” movement is a sham in which he has been secretly mocking the
Philistines and snobs who support and defend his preposterous artistic movement
(and its “nothing-is-more” philosophy), the prize money ends up going to
Pelvin. When Kitty and Dronah realize that Phangbang’s a “loser”
(notwithstanding that he has revealed himself to be one of the greatest
artistic talents of his generation), they stab him to death. Purvel,
overwhelmed with grief for his involvement in this hideous scandal, turns
himself in to the authorities. In the end it is learned that Pelvin, a cold and
unscrupulous charlatan, has bribed President Lovebucks, an influential member
of the Modigger Prize Snub-Committee, with half the prize money. They both run
off to Zürich together to stash their booty in a Swiss bank account.
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