Director's Concept Statement

by Bat Boy director Gordon Hensley

Three siblings find a half boy/ half bat creature in cave in rural West Virginia.   The local sheriff then brings Bat Boy to the home of the local veterinarian, Dr. Parker.   Bat Boy is soon accepted in the Parker family and raised by Dr. Parker's wife, Meredith, and her daughter, Shelley.   Things get more complicated when Shelley and Bat Boy fall in love and Meredith reveals that she is actually Bat Boy's mother.   Enraged, Dr. Parker leads the town folk in a murderous rampage against Bat Boy.

It's about a bat.   It's about love.   It's about two hours.   The directing concept for this show is total camp.   Camp sees everything in quotation marks.   It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman."   Pure Camp is always naïve.   The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious.   This production is going to be good because it's awful.   Camp acting style incorporates excellent comedic timing and "coincidental" blocking patterns.   And then there's the choreography--which comes out of nowhere along with the music.   The actors know the audience is present--and is putting on a show for them... I mean a "show."   It's basic staged storytelling.

"Camp is playful, anti-serious.   More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to 'the serious.'   One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.   Camp proposes a comic vision of the world.   But not a bitter or polemical comedy."   - Susan Sontag

"You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance." - Christopher Isherwood