THEATER REVIEW ‘THE BEEPLE’ : Going Buggy : A Texan lands her spaceship in a world populated by wacky insects and launches a fun matinee for children.

Initiating its 25th year of children’s theater, Cal Lutheran University’s theater department is offering “The Beeple,” a fantasy of about the same age by British author Alan Cullen.

There will be two performances Saturday at the Little Theater on the Thousand Oaks campus; others this week are scheduled at Walnut School in Newbury Park and at the Moorpark Community Center. The shows are produced in cooperation with the Thousand Oaks branch of the American Assn. of University Women.

A space traveler lands on a planet populated by “Beeple,” human-sized insectlike creatures that look like four-legged bumblebees. Before long, the visitor gets caught up in a kidnaping and an attempted military coup by rival insects.

Director Ken Gardner of Cal Lutheran’s drama department has adapted and simplified the original script somewhat, cutting the cast by about half and the running time by a third, down to a comfortable hour.

He has also changed the space-traveling protagonist from Cullen’s Britisher named John Willy to an American who speaks very loudly in a thick accent, is very aggressive and won’t follow advice from the locals--and so must be from either New York City or Texas.

As it turns out, the character, Billy Joe Lassiter, is a Texan whose spaceship is the result of a botched attempt to assemble a do-it-yourself mechanical bull. The instructions, she explains, were in Japanese.

Though the Beeple may be social insects, they aren’t all that sociable, especially the matriarch Queebee (Laura Maxwell), whose character can be traced to Queen Victoria or the Red Queen in “Alice in Wonderland.”

Queebee’s instant distrust of the foreign invader Billy Joe (Kelly Calwell) is set aside once the adventures begin: Princess Sweebee (Justine Skeeleg) has been kidnaped by Wossup the Terrible (Jennifer Josephs) and Ornit the Horrible (Craig Kuehne). It’s up to Billy Joe and Sweebee’s secret admirer, the shy Humble (Brian Harper), to save her and her intended, Beeple military hero Glorybee (Shaun Travers).

Gardner’s actors, all Cal Lutheran students, appropriately overplay like all get-out, none more appealingly so than Deanna Serago as the Fuzzbuzz, a humorously annoying creature who looks something like a beanbag chair. Also notable is Julie Schepis as the spiderlike Miss Webb, who almost . . . no, it’s too horrible to tell.

The play belies its British origins by using language and concepts that are probably a little advanced for the tots at Saturday afternoon’s opening performance. If you have to explain to your children what formidable, tactful and disavowed mean, or if the kids won’t figure it out in context, they may be too young.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“The Beeple” continues this afternoon at 3:15 at Walnut School, 1581 Dena Drive, Newbury Park; 1 and 3 p.m. Saturday at the Cal Lutheran Little Theater, 60 W. Olsen Road, Thousand Oaks, and 3 p.m. Sunday at the Moorpark Community Center in the Moorpark City Hall complex, 799 Moorpark Ave. Tickets are $3. Early arrival is recommended, as the Cal Lutheran children’s shows tend to sell out. Advance tickets are available for groups of 10 or more. For reservations or information, call 492-1174 or 499-2225.