"The Chemistry Professor" is a script for a stage musical based on Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Noting it was Stevenson's first writing for which he was paid, Vonnegut calls the original work "a tiny thing, no more than sixty pages" and "surprisingly sketchy and sparsely populated" with "very little characterization". The adaptation—for which Vonnegut notes he was never paid—arose during the summer of 1978 while serving on the New York State Council for the Arts along with the Broadway producer Lee Guber, with whom he became friends and who asked him to write the script. It was included in Palm Sunday in March 1981, where Vonnegut referred to it as "excellent, if a little slapdash and short".[1]
Plot Summary[]
At noon on a spring day at Sweetbread College, a small-liberal arts school outside Philadelphia, a chorus of unhappy students, including "scatterbrained coed" Kimberly and her "studious boyfriend" Sam, bemoan to Sally, a cheerleader, about a recent report in the school paper, the Daily Pancreas, that the school is bankrupt and will close in two weeks. The president of the student body and Sally's boyfriend, Jerry Rivers, arrives with his "mother's fifth and possibly final husband", Fred Leghorn, who made his fortune in the "mechanized chicken industry". Distraught over the news, Jerry suggests the students raise money for the college with a Broadway musical. Soon after Dr. Henry Jekyll—head of the chemistry department and "the only faculty member with a statewide reputation"—and Pops, the campus police officer, arrive consoling Whitefeet, the college president and philosopher. Whitefeet lost the school's endowment to a fast-talking investment counselor. The students inform him of their plan to stage a fundraising musical, but Jekyll is also inspired to produce some Nobel Prize-level work to help the school.
Robert Louis Stevenson, c. 1887
That night at 10pm finds Jekyll trying to think of new idea in chemistry in his lab, which is stocked with several illegal narcotics and vitamins which he's confiscated from students. Jerry arrives, saying he's been unable to think of a plot for the musical. Since Jekyll is now the school's only hope, Jerry plans to send some "inspiration". Shortly after he leaves, Leghorn visits with a green liquid he says his competitors have been feeding to his chickens and offers Jekyll $500 to run an analysis on it. Once Leghorn leave, Sally arrives with "a line of coeds in diaphanous nightgowns". Although Jekyll, horrified, assumes they've arrived to seduce him, they explain that they're Muses and begin "a sort of here-we-go-gathering-nuts-in-May dance". Whitefeet enters and is shocked at the scene, accusing Jekyll of also being a Mr. Hyde. Sally, inspired, runs to suggest to Jerry that the story of Jekyll and Hyde be the basis of the musical. Despite his name, Jekyll has never heard of the story and Whitefeet explains how a scientist testing his own experiment finds that he can change his appearance and personality. Jekyll is impressed that the scientist tried it on himself.
At the Mildred Peasely Bangtree Memorial Theater, the students, along with Pops, get ready to rehearse. Leghorn, who has recently learned of Jerry's mother's intent to divorce him, finds a fog machine from the students' "rock and roll version of Macbeth" which looks similar to an old industrial chicken roaster. Meanwhile, Jekyll is mixing the mysterious chicken supplement with LSD and various other items from him lab. His "gorgeous, tragically neglected" wife visits and he attempts to get her to drink his concoction. She refuses and leaves, forcing Jekyll to take it himself, which turns him into "an enormous, homicidal chicken".
By midnight the students have constructed a set representing nineteenth-century London with a pub, Jekyll's secret lab, and his home along with various streetlamps, under which waits Sally playing "a whore with a hear of gold". Leghorn works the fog machine, which he discover was indeed one of his old industrial chicken roasters. They begin to rehearse, with a song and dance—"to be written by somebody else", Vonnegut notes—relating that the happy citizens fear the nightfall and fog. Where Sally stands another prostitute had been killed a few nights before. Jerry, as Jekyll, walks the streets admired by all and enters his lab unnoticed during a bar fight, later broken up by Pops dressed as a bobby. Sam enters as Utterson, Jekyll's best friend, carrying a large briefcase on which "Lawyer" is prominently displayed. He knocks on the door of Jekyll's home, concerned that his friend had recently changed his will to leave all his possessions to a previously unknown Mr. Hyde. Finding no one at home, he goes to the pub.
Now transformed into Mr. Hyde, Jerry leers out the front door of the lab and invites Sally in. A drunk leaves the pub, singing a song about the beauty of love, after which a disheveled Sally is thrown out the door while Jerry throws out money and berates her. Spotting Kimberly as a nurse maid pushing a perambulator, Jerry surreptitiously plants a bomb in with the baby, which soon explodes, drawing people from the pub. Pops takes Kimberly's statement on the crime and the two enter the pub, while Sam wonders if Jekyll's secret experiments involve bombs. When confronted, Jerry instead informs him that his experiments involve using chemicals to alter human character. He claims there are no side effects but then suddenly turns into Hyde and begins choking his friend to death. The crowd from the pub exits and Pops shoots at Jerry, forgetting that his gun is loaded with real bullets. The rehearsal abruptly stops, and the cast eject Pops from the theater for his irresponsibility.
While Jerry bemoans the failure of his plan to save the school, Pops runs in screaming that he saw a giant chicken eating a Doberman pinscher. With the gun confiscated from Pops, Leghorn goes outside but, quickly finding his shots ineffective, he calls on the students for help. All join him except Kimberly, who declares herself "a follower of Albert Schweitzer" and is also rather sleepy. While she dozes, the wounded and enraged chicken sneaks in and approaches her ominously. In the nick of time, the armed mob returns and Leghorn holds a conversation in chicken language with the creature Jekyll has become, learning that he is dying from his injuries. Whitefeet and Mrs. Jekyll enter during a tragic death scene, complete with an aria in chicken language asking to be roasted and fed to orphans. However, the assembled decide that this would be "morally repugnant in a Christian society at this time" and instead Jekyll's remains will be buried in an unmarked grave and the story kept quiet since it would "interfere with recruiting and fund raising activities" as well as baffle the county prosecutor.[2]