Sex in the Library: A Play in Ten Scenes

Hale is a graduate student with a penchant for casual sex in public places. He meets his match in Boz, a graduate student with a moral core and an inexplicable attraction to strange people. Hale, a relative stranger to Boz, meets her in the university library and predicts that he and Boz will have casual sex, and this initiates a cat-and-mouse dialogue as well as a cat-and-mouse relationship between the two. Boz has a friend, Zoe, who has a bit of a history of casual sex herself, but Zoe sees Boz as possibly going down a dangerous path with the likes of Hale. Hale has a friend, Luc, who sees Hale sliding down a slippery slope of illicit sex since their days together in high school. Tara is an undergraduate student who works in the library; she becomes a lesson in casual sex. The underlying sexual and moral tensions between Hale and Boz develop through their seductive and intelligent banter, and are inadvertently exacerbated by their respective interaction with their friends. Sex in the Library explores the modern practice of sex being "an extension of a handshake", a type of game engaged in with minimal emotional investment and maximal technique, a game to win and then move on, a game for both sexes. The play poses the unsettling question of whether or not our sexual liberation undertaken in the 60's and the diminished vice-grip of religious morality on sex has actually advanced our emotional growth and self-insight as a species.