Nearly naked, Jacob Cayouette scurried across the floor, his hairless body pivoting swiftly on all fours. In a darkened space with cavernous echoes of dripping water, he seemed more animal than man as he eluded three intruders trying to capture him. He barked and chirped in fear, until finally he lunged at one of the trespassers and sank his fangs into her neck.

Cayouette had been waiting to do this all his life.

“My dream is to be an actor in musical theater,” said the Rockport native, who portrays the half-bat, half-human star of “Bat Boy: The Musical,” a campy contemporary morality tale opening tonight at the University of Maine in Orono.

The creature, found by three rappelling teens in a West Virginia cave, is a kind of Frankenstein monster-meets-Eliza-Doolittle role that requires an actor to shave his entire body, wear fangs and pointy ears, and, in the course of just over two hours, transform from an unclothed, yelping varmint into a British-style preppie capable of reciting Shakespeare and doing high kicks to a Broadway show tune.

A little over two years ago, the theater major was living in an environment where the real dangers were far more threatening than the imaginary ones he now confronts onstage. As a soldier in the U.S. Army, Spc. Cayouette was stationed atop a blazingly hot mountain in the desert of eastern Iraq, where he spent eight hours a day monitoring radio transmissions and another four hours guarding the camp against attacks.

He and more than a dozen other soldiers lived a remote existence, commanding their solitary base for one to two months at a time without a break. They had no Internet service and were allowed to use a satellite phone every other day for 15 minutes. Cayouette, pronounced KAY-yoo-ett, usually called family members in Maine.

“Nothing in the world is too difficult or too terrible to do after being there,” said Cayouette, who was honorably discharged in 2006, and is now, at 22, enrolled at UM as a freshman. “No matter how bad my life gets, it won’t be that bad again – hopefully. It helps to think about that when you get down. You have a lot to pull from, too. I have a lot of fear to pull from. All that, and I have a sense of uselessness. You feel useless there.”

These days, Cayouette’s views on the war differ radically from President Bush’s. Yet, by his own admission, the military saved his life. In Cayouette’s last year at Camden-Rockport High School (now Camden Hills Regional High School), he realized mediocre grades would not impress college admission directors. He had been a member of an elite chamber singing group at the school and had grown up performing with his family and in plays. But none of that could improve his academic chances. “I was lazy,” he said.

Good to go

After the tragedies of Sept. 11, 2001, a swell of patriotism sealed the deal. A year earlier, his older brother, Joe, had signed up with the Army. Cayouette followed. Both served in Iraq.

“When I heard Jacob enlisted, I was worried about him,” said his high school choral director, Kim Church. “But it turned out that the military was a good place for him. He struggled a bit in his senior year here, but he’s such a sweetheart. He was always so easy to work with. He’s a great tenor with a natural gift. When he came back to visit – he’d be in his uniform – you could tell he matured very quickly. You could tell the military had been a great place for him.”

Cayouette’s first stop after basic training was the Army base in Wurzburg, Germany. By mid-2003, he was building communications towers at the Baghdad airport in 140-degree temperatures. The insurgency had not fully ramped up during that first tour, which lasted six months.

When he returned to Germany, Cayouette learned of the U.S. Army Soldier Show, a live 90-minute song-and-dance revue featuring the talents of active-duty soldiers. More than 200 hopefuls apply each year. Final auditions are fiercely competitive, and only about 18 are chosen for the seven-month worldwide tour of military bases and other venues.

“If he wasn’t talking, that kid was always running around singing,” said Spc. Ryan Smith, Cayouette’s roommate in Germany. Smith, now based in Atlanta, Ga., is scheduled for redeployment to Iraq later this year. “He hated my singing,” Cayouette said with a laugh. “But we got each other through. He has cried on my shoulder. I cried on his.” Smith was not only the private beneficiary of Cayouette’s expressive voice; he also encouraged his friend to audition for “Bat Boy.” “I think he’s awesome,” said Smith. “We always talked about our dreams and goals. I said: Go for it, don’t sell yourself short.”

Cayouette had learned not to sell himself short back in Germany, where he submitted an application for the Soldier Show. Victor Hurtado, who has directed the revue since 2001, remembers the audition.

“His voice alluded to pop, but he was singing his part in a chamber music piece – a harmonic part,” said Hurtado. “I asked: ‘Can you sing a lead?’ So he sang an alternative rock thing, and of course, his voice fit right into it. It set up my respect for him right away.”

Hurtado noticed something else, too: “He was confident without lacking humility. He knew what he was there for, and he didn’t just give me the answers he thought I wanted to hear. He was connecting with me as the flag unravels, as the onion peeled, in the moment.”

Cayouette not only made the cut. His distinctive vibrato – Hurtado compared it to Cher’s – won him a solo spot singing “This Love” by the neo-soul rock band Maroon 5.

In addition to the rigors of performance, cast members for the Soldier Show also serve as the tech team setting up and striking 18 tons of equipment at each stop. They are, after all, soldiers, and while members of Actors’ Equity Association, the national union for theater professionals, might not agree to talent hoisting heavy machinery, this is the U.S. military. It’s not for sissies. Or divas, as Hurtado likes to say. Some soldiers have described the show as their toughest duty outside of combat. But no matter what each actor-singer’s position on the war, there’s no question that they would rather be singing than fighting.

That was also true of Cayouette, especially after his second Iraq tour in 2004, when he spent the better part of a year on the communications peak – dubbed “Magic Mountain” by the soldiers. “There was nothing to look forward to,” he said. Those were bleak, boring times.

With the active-duty part of his service completed – there is a remote chance he could be called back – Cayouette says he cannot find a focus for his memories of Iraq. In fact, much of his time in-country is a blurry combination of discomfort, fear and meaninglessness.

“When it comes to Iraq, I’m sorry, I can’t be specific about my time there,” he said late one night after rehearsal. “Honestly, I don’t know what I think. I don’t know much about what I did there or if I did any good. I don’t know what to tell people and what’s relevant. It’s a confusing subject for me. I just know there’s a huge part of me that does not want to believe that I spent a year and a half of my life over there for nothing. A lot of soldiers feel the same way. Did my buddies – 3,000 of them – die for nothing?”

Getting the job done

Most people who know Cayouette say that he is a perfectionist. He wants to do things right. If he puts his mind to a task, he pursues it wholeheartedly. That has been true since he was a boy.

“He did a play in first grade and stole the show,” said his father, Mark Cayouette, a salesman at Cayouette Flooring, a family business in Rockland. “That’s Jake in a nutshell. He puts oodles of time into his practice. At home, you always got tired of him practicing. There’s no halfway with him.”

Not then. Not now.

“He’s very responsive onstage,” said Whitney Blethen, a third-year theater major who was in Cayouette’s chamber singing group in Camden. Her character, Shelley, falls in love with Bat Boy. “Jacob was very nervous at the beginning of rehearsals, but he’s really owning the role now. He’s very honest with his acting. And he tries very hard. He’s never going to say: Good enough or close enough. He’s a very hard worker.”

That quality did not escape the notice of Marcia Douglas, the show’s director and chair of the theater division of the School of Performing Arts. Cayouette auditioned for a choral role. She gave him Bat Boy.

To cast an unknown and a freshman in a lead – for which an actor has to play both a bat and a tragic hero – was a major risk on Douglas’ part. “We felt he could sing it,” she said. “It’s a very difficult part. Jacob also has a vulnerability that was right. He’s a very internal, quiet guy. You can tell he’s working hard. He’s pretty much a perfectionist.”

The key to the character, said Deven May, who originated the role and performed it more than 800 times in New York City in 2001, is to be cautious with the balance of comedy and tragedy. Bat Boy has to be played with a childlike quality.

“He’s an innocent,” said May, who is in California touring in the musical “Jersey Boys.” “The danger is in playing it for the comedy. It’s not about how funny you can be. The things that are funny are also extremely sad. No matter how many times he tries to fit in or please others, Bat Boy gets told he won’t fit in.”

May said he related to the role because, as a child, he was obese, and his weight alienated him. Cayouette tells a similar story. Home-schooled by Christian parents with strong beliefs, he and his siblings – Joe and a younger sister, Charissa – did statewide music tours together with their parents. They performed at churches and “places where people were hurting,” said Mark Cayouette. “We sang about being hopeful, positive, not giving up.”

When Jacob Cayouette was 10, his parents divorced and he went to public school. That’s when he learned about being an outsider.

“I didn’t have street smarts or social skills,” he said. “I had been raised one way and was very naive. I had to learn the hard way over a number of years how to be with people.” He paused. “My family has always been supportive of everything I do. When my grades were failing, my parents threatened to take away a show. But they never did. I had a great childhood. My parents are great people. But I was very sheltered.”

The singing helped. Then the military helped. Indeed, Cayouette seems to be a happy person, a kid parents can be proud of. He is polite, well-groomed, straight-backed and articulate. His blue eyes light up when he speaks of his German girlfriend and about musicals he has seen. He has a big voice and an even bigger smile. He’s a hefty guy, but something tenderhearted comes through when he plays Bat Boy, who eventually becomes known as Edgar.

At the end of Act I, the local veterinarian challenges Edgar, who by this time is sporting a bow tie, to consider whether the freakish boy can ever fully be human. In the scene, Edgar is hungry and looks to the doctor for his daily ration of fresh blood. Instead of handing him a decapitated goose or rat, the doc hands the conflicted boy a live rabbit. If Edgar is so human, can he resist killing the bunny for dinner?

The scene is gruesome, but something of Cayouette’s real personality comes through in that moment. As Edgar, he is struggling with his own nature. At the same time, Cayouette’s large hands wrap around the tiny rabbit – a live one – with stunning gentleness. His character may be a beast, but Cayouette has more depth than that. At 22, he has seen much of the world and lived amidst the unimaginable.

“I think about his time in Iraq,” said Douglas. “But keep in mind that everybody involved has life experience that has been agitated in this production. Certainly, my heart goes out to him because his life experience is so different from anyone who hasn’t been to war.”

Love your inner Bat Boy

Before knowing Cayouette, she chose “Bat Boy” as a way to comment on larger national issues.

“We are in wartime, and people are afraid of anyone who looks different,” said Douglas. “It’s a fearful environment. When Bat Boy arrives, the townspeople think they can benefit from him. As time goes by, he becomes a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong. The thing that appeals to me and that I want to get out to the audience is how we deal with the quote-unquote other, how we make assumptions and don’t even give them a chance to let us know who they are.”

Pedagogically, Douglas also wanted to do the show because of the interest – and musical talent – stirred by last year’s production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” on campus. “Bat Boy” is, after all, a distant cousin to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera – musically and, in a skewered way, thematically. It also has echoes of “My Fair Lady,” “Annie,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Beauty and the Beast.” But it is not for children.

The work is most indebted to Stephen Sondheim, American master of the contemporary musical. As with Sondheim, the writers of “Bat Boy” – Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming with composer Laurence O’Keefe – do not shy away from uncomfortable topics.

“Bat Boy,” which is taken from a report in a tabloid, may ultimately be a blue-collar story about accepting the beast inside, but it makes stops along the way for scenes of rape, incest, violence, marital strife, campaign corruption, twisted fundamentalism and a lot of gore. John Lahr, reviewing the 2001 production for The New Yorker, wrote that “Bat Boy” may be the “only play in the history of the theatre whose hero ends Act I with a rabbit in his mouth and moves on, in Act II, to an entire cow’s head.”

“The dude drinks blood,” said Cayouette of his character. “The show has subtle themes about equality and accepting people for who they are. Edgar doesn’t know anything except for what he has seen on ‘Masterpiece Theatre.’ That’s also what makes him so lovable. I love him, and I think the audience will love him. At the beginning you love him because he’s cute and funny. At the end you love him because he’s hurt and pissed off and in a bad place, and you feel for him. On the other hand, he does come out with that dead cow. Edgar is the animal, but he’s more what a human being should be than anyone in the entire town. I think in the end it’s about: Let who you are shine through, don’t cover it up.”

Hoping the theater of war is behind him, Cayouette has moved on to another stage. While he worries for his buddies in the service, he supports them. The war is another matter. He has done his duty for his country. Now Cayouette hopes to find work as a singer and actor. “I only want to learn,” Edgar sings in “Bat Boy.” “I deserve a turn.” The show’s lesson may be “don’t deny your beast inside.” But Cayouette’s goal is to make sure he does not deny the artist inside.

If you go

The University of Maine School of Performing Arts will present “Bat Boy: The Musical,” 7:30 p.m. Feb. 16-17 and Feb. 22-24, and 2 p.m. Feb. 18 and 25 at Hauck Auditorium in Orono. General admission is $12; students with a MaineCard are admitted free. The show is intended for adult audiences. For tickets, call 581-1755. Look for Alicia Anstead’s review of the show in Lifestyle on Tuesday, Feb. 20.