THEATRE REVIEW: This is one reunion you'll want to attend

DAVE MCKNIGHT PHOTO Enlarge Image

Marina Stephenson Kerr, left, gets in touch with her inner Indigo Girl.

The Indigo Girls recall about education in their song Closer to Fine, "I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper and I was free."

Clarity, insight and self-acceptance, they suggest, aren't to be found in learned degrees, nor in booze, gurus, bibles or workouts.

The true insight may be that "there's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line." And we're closer to fine when we recognize, "It's only life after all."

That song by a lesbian duo is used to ideal effect in Prairie Theatre Exchange's season-opening production of Bingo!, a winning new comedy by Daniel MacIvor about a 30-year high school reunion in a Nova Scotia town.

The fact that Boots (Winnipeg's Marina Stephenson Kerr), a gruff, butch letter carrier suspected by others of being a lesbian in denial, adores Closer to Fine generates some great laughs. When the incomparable Stephenson Kerr sings and plays air guitar to it, it's a priceless moment that you never want to end.

But the song is there for philosophical reasons, too. Throughout the two-hour show, which flies by, MacIvor and the cast pull off a deft balance between deeply human comedy, mid-life yearning and regret, and understated, gently upbeat wisdom.

"Nothing worked out the way it was supposed to," laments one character in a line that could be right out of Chekhov's Three Sisters.

"'Today is the first day of the rest of your life' -- isn't that from the Bible?" offers another.

Of the five reunited classmates in their late 40s, three still live in their hometown, one has moved to Halifax, and the fifth to Calgary. In the course of a reunion night of ritualistic drinking -- with decades-old cassette tapes in the boombox -- secrets and insecurities are revealed, chains are yanked, disappointments are confessed and tentative new bonds emerge.

The Calgary-based Nurk (Jeffrey Renn) is an awkward, sensitive nerd, an environmental engineer who tends to gobble like a turkey when he talks to women.

Dookie (Ted Atherton) is a smug, slick Halifax real estate agent who habitually lies to his wife and figures the group's peak experiences are behind them.

Heffer (Robert Moloney) is an endearing, scruffy hoser in an Iron Maiden T-shirt whose wife prefers an alternative lifestyle.

Bitsy (Miriam Smith), who's inseparable from Boots, is a mousy, flighty thing who never married despite being "pre-pre-engaged twice."

Granted, there's nothing theatrically original about assembling a group with a shared past for a night of gut spilling (in this case, literally, since the absurd object of the drinking game Bingo! is to puke so you can guzzle more). And MacIvor does seem to leave the most negatively portrayed character hanging a bit at the end.

But the veteran playwright, conveying great affection for his Cape Breton roots and depicting his own generation, captures the wry wit of Maritime banter and some regional quirks that will delight anybody with East Coast connections, such as the group's worship of Moncton-born rocker Matt Minglewood.

Vancouver-based director John Cooper draws terrific performances and a quick, colloquial rhythm from the cast. And MacIvor has a gift for inverting clichés, as when he has all five sing not some fist-pumping party anthem, but a wistful '70s ballad that sends each into a moony reverie. Like several moments in Bingo!, it's hilarious and poignant at the same time.

We're all susceptible to being moony. But MacIvor reminds us that at midlife we're both waning and waxing, depending on how you look at it.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 15, 2011 G5