About the Play:

Fantasies at the Frick has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

Fantasies at the Frick (or The Guard and The Guardess) is a full-length dramatic comedy by Leonard Melfi. Boy meets girl twice over in a modern tale of romance and desperation. A female guard at the Frick Museum and her male counterpart cannot help but notice a man and a woman strolling around the museum and envy their intimacy. Fantasies at the Frick is a dark comedy about people who participate in life, and those who just watch.

Fantasies at the Frick is set at the Frick Museum in New York City where two guards keep watch over the visitors. A young male guard in his first day is so nervous about his ability to meet the requirements that he keeps fortifying himself with pills and alcohol. A female guard of long standing reprimands him while encouraging him. She's so immersed in her job she's almost ecstatic about it, but it's a mechanical ecstasy. Into the museum stroll two visitors, a boy and a girl looking for pickups. They gravitate to each other instinctively. The two guards' tenuous self control is shaken as these two trendily attired dilettantes – preening and posturing – achieve a coupling which the guards may sneer at, but which they also envy. Consolation lies at hand as defenses fall.

Fantasies at the Frick premiered in 1976 at The Open Space In SoHo off off Broadway in New York City.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male

What people say:

"The play is loaded with charming sentiment." — New York Daily News

About the Playwright:

Leonard Melfi (1932-2001) was an American playwright and actor whose work has been widely produced on the American stage. He started writing original acting scenes while studying in Uta Hagen's famed acting classes and first came to the attention of American theatregoers with his short plays for Café La Mama, a birthplace for the off-off Broadway fringe in the 1960s. Best known for known for creating characters who were social outcasts, often hiding dark secrets, he wrote or contributed to over 70 plays, including his classic Birdbath.