Bat Boy
Story and book by Keythe Farley and Brian Fleming,
Music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe
Gates-Abegglen Theatre
Miami University • April 2019
Bat Boy is a kooky musical that gives us the origin story of the popular Weekly World News character. It is set in a fictional small town of Hope Falls in the deep hollows of West Virginia.
We rode with the idea that hope had indeed fallen in the town. The coal industry has left, leaving the the citizens are isolated and afraid of change. They blame Bat Boy, the weird outsider, for their woes. Research that caught my attention included rusted out and dilapidated coal tipples. And caves.
The image of a spiraling vortex was a dominant in our early discussions about environment. The mouth of a cave, the mouth of a bat child tearing the neck of a cow, a mouth screaming in fear. Confining, circular movement became very important.
The action moves fluidly from scene to scene. The look of the main unit comes from coal tipple research, with pieces added to represent different locations. The cyc is revealed through a circular opening made of a ground row, a header, and moveable wings. These units operated like an iris, always keeping the shape of a vortex, yet changing in scale and size as the characters became more deeply trapped in their own cycles of fear and hate. The aperture was at its fullest only when the prevailing emotion on stage was love, for only love can get us through our darkest moments.
Here are sketches of the different scenes.
