He Has Suffered and Now It's Your Turn

It all started with the satirical supermarket tabloid, Weekly World News. This brilliantly funny newspaper boasted outrageous headlines over the years like “Dead Rock Stars Return on Ghost Plane!” and “Faces of Howard Stern, Pamela Anderson and Satan Appear in Volcano Smoke!” and the classic, “Bill Catches Hillary With Space Alien!,” a story that claimed one of the best subheads in the history of newsprint: “I thought she was gay, says stunned ex-Prez.”

The paper once ran a story called, “Surprising Bible Prophecies Your Preacher Doesn't Want You to Read,” about a “turncoat Vatican librarian” who has revealed parts edited out of the Bible, including an unknown corollary to the Tenth Commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife unless you in turn are willing to share thine own wife with him.”

In 2001, The Washington Post published a tribute article to the tabloid, saying, “Funnier than Saturday Night Live, deeper than Leno or Letterman, smarter than Mad, more outrageous than The Onion, Weekly World News just might be America's best purveyor of social satire. The fact that it's disguised as a sleazy tabloid just makes it that much more delicious.”

Back in 1992, the Weekly World News began following every twist and turn in the bizarre life of a poor half-bat/half-boy who was found in a rural West Virginia cave. The paper dispatched a crack team of twenty-four reporters and photographers assigned exclusively to the bat boy story.

The paper described him this way: “Discovered in a cave in Hope Falls, West Virginia, this half-bat has escaped from captivity and is currently at large. He can be identified by large, pointy ears and oversized eyes that make him profoundly sensitive to sound and light. The creature has reportedly attacked at least three people with his razor-sharp fangs and should be considered extremely dangerous.”

The paper chronicled how he initially attacked a 10-year-old girl; how he was captured by the government and then got sick; how he received 17,402,901 get-well cards in the hospital from Weekly World News readers, how sympathetic nurses fed him flies; how he escaped from the hospital by crawling from a sixth-story window; how his abrupt withdrawal from hospital drugs caused him to go crazy and attempt to mate with a scarecrow; how he was chased by a bloodthirsty bounty hunter; how he was run over by an exterminator's truck; how he showed up mysteriously at Al Gore’s campaign headquarters in 2000, wanting to officially endorse Gore; how he tried to sneak into the White House to visit Jenna Bush; and most notably, how he joined the U.S. military in Afghanistan because his special bat vision made it easy for him to find the Taliban in all those caves.

In November 1996, two writers were standing in the lobby of the Actors’ Gang Theatre in Los Angeles. Keythe Farley, Gang member and director, and Brian Flemming, a screenwriter and film director, were working the concession stand for intermission of the musical Euphoria, when in wandered Laurence O’Keefe, the composer-lyricist and music director of Euphoria, taking a break. Farley and Flemming told O’Keefe they liked his music and lyrics and asked if O’Keefe would be interested in a project of theirs, based on a character from the pages of the Weekly World News named Bat Boy. They showed O’Keefe a cover of the Weekly World News featuring the bat boy’s picture, a baby with huge fangs, bulging eyes and pointy ears. They were determined to tell this poor creature’s story – from the beginning.

O’Keefe was shocked. “That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

On Halloween 1997, Bat Boy made its world premiere at the Actors’ Gang Theatre, perhaps the only place where this show would be understood and properly nurtured. The Actors’ Gang is Los Angeles’ premier repertory theatre company, creating original works and reinterpreting classics, through the prism of The Style, a performance method derived from commedia dell’arte, from the work of the Theatre du Soleil in Paris, from vaudeville, from the political agitprop theatre of the 1930s, and from the off off Broadway movement of the 1960s, particularly the work of the Play-House of the Ridiculous. The Style is artificial and presentational, yet insists on deep truthfulness and high emotional stakes. All the authors agree today that The Style was instrumental in both the writing and the execution of Bat Boy the Musical.

O’Keefe says, “The Actors' Gang is a hyperactive and politically committed theater company that teaches if you show an emotion, always make it a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. People pay money to see a show portray terror, rage, despair and joy, so we might as well sell it in megadoses. We were consciously trying to dig up the deepest and most volcanic emotions, the most inflammatory questions – what is it like to be a scapegoat? what is it like to be loved by one parent and hated by another? What is it like to have no idea who your parents are? What is it like to have an insatiable hunger for blood?”

Director and co-author Keythe Farley developed what Flemming likes to call the “take-it-so-seriously-it's-funny-but-it-also-hurts” style of Bat Boy. Both Deven May (as Edgar) and Kaitlin Hopkins (as Meredith) were in this first production and, together with Farley, they found the extremely sincere approach that this outrageous musical demands. Farley’s mantra throughout the development process was “the height of expression, the depth of sincerity,” a style of truthful acting that marked all the work at the Actors’ Gang – something the cast took to heart and something which guided them throughout the L.A. and New York productions. Brian Flemming says of his partner, “Keythe's major contribution to Bat Boy has gone largely unmentioned, but it was great and permanent.”

Unlike musicals in which the goal is to be as silly as possible (The Producers, Spamalot, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), with Bat Boy the goal is to be as serious as possible within the context of an utterly silly universe.

Julio Martinez wrote in Variety, “The clever scenario, though outrageous, always contains an aura of intriguing plausibility. And to his credit, Farley creates a supercharged mix of heightened realism, surrealism and fantasy that is always engrossing. The work is magnificently served by the emotion-charged, thoroughly realistic performance of Devon May [as the Bat Boy], who catapults himself body and soul into the seared psyche of this child who possesses the mind of a genius but the uncontrollable, blood-craving appetite of a beast.”

Throughout 1999 and 2000, the show went through staged readings at the Directors’ Company in New York, now with director Scott Schwartz at the helm. The pace of the work was stepped up, aiming toward a 2001 New York opening, with rewrites continuing even after opening. The collaboration among the writers was an unusually close one, free of ego. O’Keefe says, “I would take a character's speech and replace it with sung lyrics, or sometimes even take a line of dialogue and set it verbatim to music. Sometimes it worked in the opposite direction – we'd try a song in one place and realize it stole ideas or energy from a better song later, so the song would disappear and be replaced by new dialogue.”

Bat Boy opened at the Union Square Theatre in New York in March 2001, where it was a hit but suffered the same fate as many other New York shows after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and it closed that December. It’s tempting to guess how long the show would have run if not for the terrorist attacks and whether it would have moved uptown to Broadway like Urinetown did.

But in a post-9/11 world, the hatred and discrimination leveled against the Bat Boy in the show took on a whole new dimension, as anyone in America with a Middle Eastern background was now a potential victim of abuse, harassment, and even imprisonment, based only on their appearance, their ethnicity, their clothing. The metaphor that was Bat Boy now held a power wholly unanticipated by its creators.

The New York Times said of the off Broadway show, “It's remarkable what intelligent wit can accomplish... the show is a jaggedly imaginative mix of skewering humor and energetic glee.” The New York Post said, “Bat Boy soars! An instant classic!” The New York Daily News called it “an outrageously silly and totally charming show. . . wickedly funny! A wacky, hilarious musical!” USA Today called it “immensely satisfying.” Backstage said, “Rarely do we see a piece of theatre that is at once so smart, silly, self-aware, and easy to enjoy as Bat Boy the Musical.” 

Two years later, New Line negotiated the rights to the regional debut of the show. Our 2003 production sold out every night, and for months afterward, people were literally begging us to bring the show back. So in 2006, we did.

And now here we are nineteen years later, returning to Hope Falls again. Each time I've encountered the show, in its original 2001 off Broadway production, our productions in 2003 and 2006, and now our production this fall. Each time it seems like Bat Boy has absolutely nailed the zeitgeist, and it's the same today. So much of this ferocious satire feels like it could have been written this year.

I've come to realize that great works of art are always relevant, no matter when you interact with them. That's why people keep doing Shakespeare plays. That's why we sometimes produce older shows like The Threepenny Opera or Anything Goes. Their satire is still as timely and funny and relevant as ever. 

And what does that say about us?

As odd as it may sound, Bat Boy really is great art. As funny and silly as it is, it's a very serious piece of well-made theatre about very serious things. And you'll laugh your ass off all evening.

What could be better than that?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

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