‘Bingo’ is Slocum House’s game-o

“Queen of Bingo” director Jim Fully says the chemistry between actors Tony Bump, left, as Babe and Risa Rank as Sis animates the Slocum House Theatre Company production. (Steven Lane/The Columbian)

Risa Rank and Tony Bump didn’t plan Southern accents for their roles as sisters in “Queen of Bingo.”

But during a first reading of their parts, the banter between the two just drifted into a drawl.

“The lines just kind of go there,” said Bump, who plays Babe, a 52-year-old divorcée who agrees to play bingo with her widowed sister, 60-year-old Sis, to bring some excitement into their lives.

The Southern accents were such a good fit for Rank and Bump that Slocum House Theatre Company shifted the setting for its production to Georgia rather than Michigan as originally intended.

Fostering chemistry between actors in “Queen of Bingo” is essential, because at the heart of this play is the relationship between the two sisters who have decided to spice up their lives by playing bingo together. Playwrights Jeanne Michels and Phyllis Murphy wrote the story to explore family ties and how we all struggle with our faults and demons.

As the two sisters gossip with each other about their fellow bingo players, they also grapple with what’s going wrong in their lives. For Babe, it’s her love affair with food and her tortuous experiences with diets. For Sis, it’s her weakness for bingo – an obsession that’s driving a wedge between her and her family — and loneliness.

Vancouver’s Jim Fully, who is directing Slocum House’s “Queen of Bingo,” said he was concerned at first about the lack of action in the play. Sis and Babe spend most of the play sitting at a bingo table.

Even the priest who calls the bingo games, Father Francis McKenzie Muldoon, played by 50-year-old Clark Hart of Vancouver, often is just a voice projected from behind the set.

But as Fully got more involved in the story line, those concerns dissipated because of the play’s emotional texture.

“It’s an emotional roller coaster,” said Fully, 50. It’s enjoyable, he added, “but it’s not all funny. There are parts that are painful.”

Rank and Bump said that making the characters believable came easily to them, though there were some logistical challenges.

Bump, a 42-year old Beaverton, Ore., resident, had to pull from his experience with costuming to transform himself into a woman. Adopting a Southern accent helped him disguise his voice.

The two lead actors said that building a believable sisterhood on stage was helped by their history with each other.

Bump has been involved in a variety of theater projects with Rank, 60, of Vancouver. Though Bump lives in Oregon now, he grew up in Clark County and has been involved in theater here since he was a teenager.

“Queen of Bingo’s” comedic exploration of relationships also looks at the world of bingo and takes the novel approach of getting the audience involved. The audience is invited to play bingo during intermission and whoever wins receives a gift certificate for a turkey.

“Hopefully it will get the audience excited,” Fully said.