Portland Playhouse Goes Balls Out

BACK IN JUNE, Portland Playhouse hosted a staged,
one-night-only reading of Adam Rapp’s Bingo with the Indians.
The occasion? Adam’s brother, Anthony, was in town, playing the lead in
the Broadway touring production of Rent—a role he
originated—and he agreed to participate in the reading of his
brother’s script. Anthony, improbably, achieved pinup status for his
role in Rent; Adam is a Pulitzer-nominated playwright whose
plays have been produced all over the country; the reading sold
out.

Fast forward a few months, and Portland Playhouse is poised to
launch a full-length production of Bingo.

Only in their second season, Portland Playhouse have already made a
name for themselves: They are a fresh-faced young company that
typically deliver a perfectly conventional and perfectly safe
theater-going experience. I described their most recent show,
Fiction, as “continuing the trend established in their first
season of earnestly producing Theater That Means Something.”

After that review ran, the co-founders of Portland Playhouse
(brothers Brian and Michael Weaver) approached me: “Bingo with the
Indians is the one show this season that there’s a chance you might
like.”

The play opens this weekend, and the script is a challenging one
that could easily go disastrously off the rails. But it’s undeniable
that the decision to launch a full production of Bingo with the
Indians is the first really bold move this company has made (aside,
of course, from moving to Portland and starting a theater company in
the first place). Adam Rapp is an acclaimed playwright, but
Bingo is not an acclaimed play: Reviews across the country have
been mixed, with some critics praising its rhythmic language, and
others finding it poorly written and unduly graphic. Even Portland
Playhouse’s board balked at the script, and the Weavers’ mother sent
her sons an email expressing her dismay at the selection.

The script is profane, violent, and explicit. In the first 30
seconds, one character is referred to as a “fucking boner”; another
describes losing his virginity to a Brownie while in fifth grade. (“She
was tight, man.”)

The show follows a gang of performance artists who decide to earn
money for their new show by robbing a bingo game. There’s nudity, and a
scene that may or may not be a rape, and a barrage of insults and
profanity that may or may not be funny.

“I’d understand if you thought it was going to be ‘punk rock, fuck
you’ theater. But it’s not gonna be as alienating as you’d think,”
insists the play’s director, Tim True. True is best known as an
actor—he’s a member of Third Rail Repertory, and was recently
seen in Imago’s No Exit—and he makes his directorial debut
with Bingo. “It’s really an actor’s play,” he says of the
script. “It made sense to work on something that’s driven by language
rather than by technical needs.”

Brian Weaver plays Warren, a role that requires an unusual level of
commitment: “I’m naked and having sex for… it seems like an hour, but
it’s probably not.”

“For a period of time.” True interjects.

“My fear is that there’s gonna be an audience that’s sitting there
with their arms crossed, not finding anything funny, and then the sex
scenes look like sexploitation, and then I’m showing them my anus for
nothing,” Weaver says.

“I’m not worried about how the audience responds, as long as they
respond,” True concludes. And from audiences accustomed to Portland
Playhouse’s by-the-book earnestness, there’s no doubt this play will
get a reaction.