WEETZIE BAT
Zebra Crossing Theatre
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Weetzie Bat, an award-winning book for young adults by Francesca Lia Block, has been adapted for the stage by director Ann Boyd and Julia Neary, who plays the title character. Boyd makes the grit in Block’s up-to-the-minute poetry come through, and the result is a sometimes frantic, sometimes graceful, and nearly always effective production.
At first glance Weetzie is just another loud adolescent girl glorying in the magic of Los Angeles–her torn fishnet stockings worn with combat boots and short skirt seem tiresome badges of the would-be free spirit, and I settled in for yet another coming-of-age story. Weetzie’s love of LA is infectious, however: she describes Venice Beach as having “columns and canals like the real Venice, maybe, only cooler because of the surfers.” It’s also disturbing: like her itinerant scriptwriter father, Charlie Bat (Dan Howell, rumpled and sweet), Weetzie is a sucker for LA’s easy illusions; as the elder Bat observes, living there is too much “like having a good dream that you know you’re going to wake up from.”
The only fly in this ointment is some out-and-out tedious video, presumably meant to illustrate Weetzie’s preoccupation with movies–something the script does a fine job of handling on its own. This tight, whimsical little play doesn’t need badly shot and often incoherent home movies.
A bit heavy-handed are references to a wild raccoon kept in a cage. “You ain’t supposed to cage up pets,” Lypso informs Phestus. “Maybe she’s just itchin’ to go someplace.” Lypso herself obviously is, bored with her little paradise but unable to leave it, and later so is Odysseus. Besides, his teeth start to fall out when he hangs around with immortals too long, though why is never quite made clear.
