Under the B for "Bingo!": Behind-the-scenes with Ted Atherton

Robert Moloney, Ted Atherton & Jeffrey Renn in Bingo!  (David McKnight)

Can you go home again?  Daniel MacIvor's latest hilarious comedy follows five people as they gather in their hometown in Cape Breton for their 30th high school reunion.  The friends revert to childhood ways as they rekindle past friendships.  Memories both good and bad surface, and then become blurred during the drinking game called Bingo.

Ted Atherton plays the role of Dookie in Prairie Theatre Exchange's production of Bingo! 

SCENE asked Ted to take you behind-the-scenes and reflect on the memories the play evokes for him:

Nostalgia isn't just one emotion.  It's like that type of rock we learned about in Mr. Paul's Grade 4 class at Central North School in Transcona.  There's sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rock.  Then there's this thing called conglomerate rock, which is a jumbled mixture of all three. 

Nostalgia is a potent mixture of longing, regret, and a sad affection for what was...and isn't anymore.  It's not a straightforwardly pleasant emotion, yet it has the power to draw us to the places we used to live when we were different people.  Younger people.

The first ten years of my acting career were spent onstage.  The last ten have been mostly on TV.  Here at Prairie Theatre Exchange,  as I prepare to step onto the stage for the first time in ten years, in Winnipeg, the city of my birth, in Daniel MacIvor's Bingo!, a comedy about a thirtieth high school reunion, thoughts of return and home and time passing are very much on my mind.

I was thirteen when we moved to Toronto.  A couple of years later, I remember cranking my head around at the sight of an entire parking lot full of orange Winnipeg Transit buses.  They were made in Toronto.   How weird is that?   And what is that strange tugging in my solar plexus?   

Back here for work a few years ago, what made me take one of those orange buses out to the end of Regent Street to look at the sandbox--it's still there!--that I dug in when I was six?  Why, wandering around the yard of my old grade school, am I fascinated to find that the handrail by the stairs where we used to line up after recess is still bent at the same skewed angle? Lurking about the house where I grew, I see that they've faced the front with stone.  Why am I both disappointed and strangely relieved that it has changed, too?

I think of my own young sons and I remember one of my lines from Bingo. Speaking of his childhood, my character Doug "Dookie" Duke, says: "We were Princes." It's true. My own boys are Princes. They are noble. They are good and brave and true. 

I'm not.  

It's not like I want to be ten years old again. No, thank-you. And I'm not moving back here, despite the friendly people, awesome music scene, and affordable real estate. My home is in Toronto with my family.   

In Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot asks "To what purpose disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves?" So, to what purpose do I stand here at the foot of the Richardson building and crane my neck, squinting my eyes as I try to awaken a childhood vision of it as the tallest building in the world?   The same purpose, I guess, that draws elephants to their graveyards to stand in silence, stretch out their trunks, and gently stir the bones. 


Ted Atherton plays the role of Dookie