Queen of Bingo

Review

By Richard E. Noble

There’s a card table set on the center of the stage and it represents one table among a gym floor full of similar tables at St. Joseph’s auditorium in a Catholic church in Battle Creek Michigan, U.S.A. Two sisters, Sis and Babe, will be meeting there for the traditional evening of hard-core, Saturday night bingo playing.
Sis, Beth Blair, is the first to appear. She has all of her Bingo paraphernalia. Her favorite seat cushion, her magic-marker daubers, and all her good luck charms. Sis is the meticulous one - everything in its right place. Beth Blair who studied speech at Muskingum in Ohio clearly understands the bingo-player cult and the Michigander culture. She loves to play bingo and her characterization of Sis is lovable and endearing.
Babe, Dorothy Marie Robinson, arrives somewhat late - but not too late - but, I’m sure, always late. We all know the type. She is the outspoken one, the big sister, the leader of the pack and the envy of her “little” sister and all their less confident playmates. She comes with all the same “equipment” but is somewhat less organized and colorfully verbal. She is right there on the surface but as we will learn later in the play her hard, gruff exterior will be softened by a sensitive and vulnerable interior.
Both women are “pretending” to be over fifty and once again husbandless - both facts a tragedy in themselves.
Being raised a Roman Catholic myself the inspiration for this play was very, very familiar - and equally predictable. But then as the spotlight on the center stage bingo table softened and the characters proceeded into a stage right and stage left halo of abstracted attention, one dips into the personal lives and private hopes, anxieties and angst of the two main characters. As the G-12’s and 1-16’s of bingo notoriety are called out in a muffled background, in the foreground we hear “confessions”. And here we learn the silent tragedies of the two sisters who are the stars of this production.
Both of their humorously rendered stories are familiar to all of us - loneliness, compulsion, neglect, mortality, maturity - but each story is told in the common vernacular and understood without interpretation or serious contemplation, spontaneously by the audience.
You will “get it” while you are there and if I am any kind of a student of the human mind you will get even more of it by the time you get home and in the future days of your life. If you don’t get it consciously you will get it osmoticly - because that is what “art” is; because that is what art does. It sneaks into our lives via the laughs and the giggles and around the corners of our apprehensions. Often it is sophisticated and subliminal - though on its surface it may appear mundane, everyday, and even trivial. But you will get it. It will get to you in the sounds of its notes or the burst of its laughter, in its shapes and designs, in its textures and feel, in the coarseness or beauty of its language or in its tears and sadness.
This is a humorous play on its surface, but nevertheless a tragedy at its roots. As Ernest Hemingway once expressed, and I paraphrase; Every life is a tragedy; each ending in death.
Don’t let me frighten you away - this play is funny. It is meant to be funny. Father Mac, David Poirier, is funny. His rendition of the joking Irish priest giving away frozen turkeys and hosting fund-raisers of every “bake, muffin, and cookie” is great. Though I must say I remember no such priest in my career as a child. All the priests to whom I was exposed were very serious - very “new roof” and “new furnace” in their character. Most were Irish though. The only happy-go-lucky Irish priest that I ever saw was Bing Crosby in the “Bells of St. Mary’s”.
Both Beth Blair and Dorothy Robinson are funny. They are typical mid-west. I know mid-west via my wife’s relatives who are all from Michigan. People from Michigan and that area, I have come to believe are the true “American Travelers”. Whether you go north, south, east or west you will invariably run into people from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and thereabouts - not so with other areas of our country. I feel I know Babe personally - I could tell you her real name, but I won’t - Marge, Beverly, Barbara, Gail and a host of others will all be mad at me if I do.
Even Kurt Blair whom I have seen “perform” at many a very somber County Commission meeting is funny as an exuberant church bingo usher. I have seen and known many an usher exactly like Mr. Blair’s brief but exacting performance.
I am also convinced that the - sit-down and put your head between your legs and breathe deeply - trick is of Roman Catholic origin.
This is not a religious play. It’s a satire of the religious message but nevertheless, in the setting of the Bingo Parlor (without all the smoke, I’m happy to say) we have a tiny “spiritual awaking”. Inadvertently we stumble onto the root of religious intimacy - fear, loneliness, and desperation sitting along side of socialabilty, love, friendship and community.
This play was “lite” but not shallow. It was written by Jeanne Michels and Phyllis Murphy and directed by Cleo Holladay.
This particular production was produced by Dixie Partington and Jerry Hall.
I know that the Dixie Theatre has its crowd of regulars and loyal supporters but if you are like me and have been raised in the pungent atmosphere of sweat, blue-collar and calluses and have never before witnessed a “play”, the Dixie Theatre is really an opportunity of a lifetime. It is quite an experience. It is somewhat like the Big, Silver Screen - but with considerably more imagination and real, live, everyday people who sparkle nonetheless. Try it one evening or afternoon. Who knows, you might be “inspired”.
Call Susan Turner down at the Box Office at 653-3200 and get the upcoming schedule of events.