The Theatre of (in)Tolerance, or Hold Me, Bat Boy

As part of my birthday festivities, Tom and I saw Bat Boy, the Musical. As I was waiting for the performance to begin, I realized I hadn't seen live theatre in several years--not since a friend and I saw The Laramie Project performed by a Philadelphia church.

Bat Boy--based on the tabloid stories about a half-human, half-bat--is fairly standard rock-opera, starting with an homage to The Who's Tommy ("Hold me, Bat Boy; touch me, Bat Boy"). Todd Schaefer in the lead did a phenomenal job of acting bat-like, especially in the beginning. The cast was energetic, although the singing was uneven.

It was when Bat Boy started delivering a Message that I stopped liking it so much. The play seemed self-congratulatory in its call for tolerance (the parallels between Bat Boy and gay people were obvious), but I wondered about equating homosexuality with the need to drink blood. Also, the play stereotypes the inhabitants of the little West Virginia town where Bat Boy was found--and as someone who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, I didn't find the hick stereotypes especially interesting or funny, especially in a musical that's preaching tolerance. The Laramie Project, on the other hand, did a powerful job of showing the subtlety and idiosyncrasy of prejudice.

The musical also made me think of Tabloid Dreams, by Robert Olen Butler, one of my favorite writers. In that collection of stories based on tabloids, Butler brings tremendous insight and compassion to his odd and isolated characters. I bought the book because I had read "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot" in the New Yorker and appreciated the way Butler was able to inhabit his character. Butler then went on to write a novel, Mr. Spaceman, based on the alien in one of the stories--that book is one of my all-time favorites, and I urge everyone to read it.

So I thought Bat Boy was not as emotionally or philosophically sophisticated as it could have been. The next night, we rented Crash on DVD to see what all the Oscar fuss was about. That movie deals with conflict between people of different ethnic groups in L.A. It moves beyond the simplistic white-oppressor/saintly-oppressed-minority dichotomy to examine the ways in which all people are biased against each other. While we weren't blown away by the movie (it depended too heavily on coincidence, and several of the characters aren't fully fleshed out), I appreciated the way it dealt with issues usually unexamined by Hollywood. In fact, it reminded me of Dickens (who also depended heavily on coincidence) because it shows interconnectedness of the different strata of society.