BAT BOY No. 3

I first saw Bat Boy off Broadway in March 2001 and I fell madly in love. And trust me, "madly" is the right word. May the theatre gods bless the writers who were crazy (or stoned) enough to write a musical based on a story in the satirical tabloid, Weekly World News.

I saw this mad mashup of musical comedy, love story, and horror-thriller again in October 2001, just before it closed, prematurely. Once the tourists stopped coming after the Sept. 11 attacks, a lot of good shows had to close.

I think it could have transferred uptown and enjoyed a healthy Broadway run. It wasn't just insanely funny -- it was one of the smartest, best built, most ridiculous, most fearless, most sophisticated, most enjoyable pieces of theatre I had ever seen. I'm not kidding -- I thought to myself, oh my god, they wrote this for ME! On that same trip to see Bat Boy again, I also got to see Urinetown for the first time, and had about the same reaction.

It was a good trip.

It was the beginning of a new Golden Age of Musical Theatre, starting in the very late 1990s and still continuing today. Our art form has never been so interesting, so inventive, so fast evolving, so full of explosive potential.

As soon as performance rights were released for Bat Boy we snatched them up and produced the show in spring 2003. One of the original off Broadway cast, St. Louisan Doug Storm, came to see us, which was very cool. After we closed, we kept getting asked when we would bring the show back. People who had seen it wanted to see it again. People who missed it, really wanted to see it. So we brought it back in 2006, with seven of the ten actors from 2003 returning. It sold out every performance, just like our first run.

When we closed our second run, I made sure to preserve the bat baby and the cow head. (If you don't know what that means, don't worry, you'll find out when you see the show.) I knew we New Liners would return to Hope Falls someday for a third production. It took us nineteen years, but here we are.

We're here because we need this story, right here, right now.

On its silly surface, Bat Boy seems to be a wacky though big-hearted satire about American prejudice and the hypocrisy of modern religion. But dig a little deeper, venture down into the dark caves and chambers of human emotion, and you’ll find a bigger, more interesting idea that underpins everything else in the show: we all have an animal side, a primitive, primordial beast in us that lashes out when we’re afraid, that drives our hungers for sex, for food, for power, for control – and of course, fear of The Other.

Just as it is with Frankenstein, it's not the monster who's the monster.

The last line of the show implores us, half-kidding, half-serious, “Don’t deny your beast inside.” And that’s really the heart of Bat Boy, the knowledge that we are, all of us, animal to one degree or another, and that we must embrace and integrate that side rather than fear it -- but also that we must not allow it to take control.

The creators of Bat Boy, Keythe Farley, Brian Flemming, and Laurence O’Keefe, have given us a hero who literally, physically embodies that dangerous mix. Edgar the Bat Boy represents every one of us, always trying to control our beast inside with only the thinnest layer of civilization as protection.

A layer that seems to get thinner every day.

Each character in the show gives in to his or her inner beast at some point in the story, but because Edgar is so obviously different on the surface, he's the one to be ridiculed, scorned, feared. We see in this beautiful, hilarious fable not only our own inner struggles, but also echoes of racism past and present (even the rationale for slavery), and of anti-gay and anti-trans laws. As technology evolves faster than our ethics, who knows who's next?

We face our inner Neanderthal in the characters that populate Bat Boy, and it’s a hell of a ride. In the age of social media, it's also more important than ever for us to do that.

But Bat Boy is also about the act of storytelling itself. In Act II of the show, a Pan-like figure called “King of the Forest” appears, to sing the slyly subversive song “Children, Children,” a pop anthem about inter-species sex. The opening lines, “Children, welcome home to where we all began,” not only invite the young lovers Edgar and Shelley back to the roots of humanity and procreation, urging them to embrace their more primal, animal natures, but these lines also invite the audience back to the roots of theatre, back to mythic stories told around a fire, back to Grotowski’s “poor theatre,” where it’s all about the storytelling, not the budget, where originality is more important than money or technology, where the audience’s imagination is the final vital ingredient.

All the usual tricks and illusions of theatre are revealed in this show. There is no deception, no suspension of disbelief, just the naked honesty that we're all there in the theatre together to share a story. Nobody needs to be fooled. The audience's imaginations can fill in the world around these characters; in fact, audiences enjoy doing that.

There are productions that engage the audience in the act of storytelling, and there are productions that leave the audience passive and unengaged, with huge sets and projections doing the storytelling work instead of the audience's imaginations. That's less fun.

By rejecting some of the more ridiculous conventions of contemporary commercial theatre (musical or non-), by insisting on a theatre of imagination instead of high-tech machines, by using imaginative techniques from the world of improv and experimental theatre, Bat Boy does comment on other musicals, intentionally or not. By its very existence and its artistic quality, Bat Boy argues that too many musicals (especially in New York commercial theatre) have gone too far, have gotten too high-tech and too expensive, and they've lost the simplicity and joy of human-to-human storytelling.

Bat Boy has a small cast, a small budget, no helicopters or chandeliers, no special effects, and yet it doesn’t suffer for all that – it ends up being more fun, more transporting, more magical, more emotional, more intense, because it goes back to the roots of storytelling and relies on its audience to participate in the magic.

Edgar the Bat Boy tries to teach the people of Hope Falls about tolerance and acceptance, while Bat Boy the musical tries to teach us, the audience, about what really matters in the theatre – relationships, emotions, people.

Especially right now.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

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