Actor Bingo O’Malley lived an epic life
Life as a journey is at the heart of some of the greatest works of imagination. The date June 16 brings to mind the great novel that takes place on that day, James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” relating in rich detail a day’s journey of Leopold Bloom around Dublin. It does so in parallel with Homer’s “The Odyssey,” which relates in grand poetry the 10-year journey of Ulysses around the entire known world.
And both journeys, the mundane travels of the Irish ad-seller and the heroic travels of the ancient Greek, provide a suggestive framework for the amazing and mysterious life journey of a dear friend, Bingo O’Malley, the actor, social worker, raconteur and passionate Pittsburgher who died June 2 at 86.
That last detail hints at the mystery of Bingo’s life: Family members and friends never seemed sure how old he was. Bingo also never let on to his birth name — no South Oakland Irish family ever baptized their son “Bingo” — but that was all he ever answered to.
These are small details in a life that included astonishing adventures in the Navy, the priesthood and bumming around America, in just what order was never entirely clear, no matter (or maybe because of) the volume of stories he told. To those fields of adventure, add many years of social work — an all-consuming “day job” — plus decades of acting on stage and screen. The intensity of his work with disturbed young people seemed to add to the intensity with which he tackled every theater role he took on.
Then there were his family and friends, the latter mainly from the world of theater. If you were lucky, Bingo spent a lot of time pouring forth stories at your kitchen table, often about battles with monsignors, bureaucrats and other bosses, rather like the warriors, monsters and small-minded bigots with whom Ulysses and Bloom struggle in their journeys. Bingo’s stories proceeded into the wee hours of the morning without pause; sometimes you just had to offer him a bed.
It was all such great stuff, I urged him to write his autobiography, but he tossed the idea aside. He always considered himself a workingman — that was enough. He poured his Joycean, Homeric life into his stories, his stage and screen characters and his many warm friendships.
His life as a screen actor is well chronicled in video, and for the stage, in many an interview and review. I wrote plenty of the latter, which were a recurring testimony to the authenticity with which he built his performances from the inside out. He always arrived at rehearsal knowing his lines, freeing him to grow in his part and to help others grow, too. He was an especially giving stage partner. No one listened better than Bingo, on stage or in life.
I know that from having shared the stage with him at the Lab Theatre, playing a son of his fearsome Max in Pinter’s “The Homecoming,” and for Stage Left, directing him in Linda Hudak’s one-act “Occupant,” in which he played a mealson-wheels worker. It was a deep pleasure to share those journeys with him. Bingo had so much to give the roles he played because he had such a full inner life to draw on.
We also took a number of literal journeys together, starting with many a play and baseball game. Then for several years, Bingo came along as an assistant on my theater tours to the Shaw and Stratford festivals in Canada. He embraced the whole thing, functioning as a kind of Mr. Congeniality, learning everyone’s name, laughing along with them, attending especially to those traveling alone.
I included him on London theater tours, as well. In spite of his total lack of a sense of direction and his very noisy dreams, which seemed the natural outgrowth of the intensity with which he lived, he was always the best traveling companion. He was even willing to take in an occasional Shakespeare play, in spite of his settled antipathy (OK, he wasn’t perfect.)
But the journey that best sums up Bingo’s energy, joy, commitment and deep confidence in his art was to his ancestral Ireland. Twice I had the privilege of seeing him perform Irish playwrights there for Andrew Paul’s Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre. Doing Shaw’s “Major Barbara” at the Galway Arts Festival took chutzpah enough, but the height — like Ulysses taking on the Cyclops on his own mountain — was taking Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer” on a three-week barnstorming tour.
To prepare the great Irish playwright’s spare and ambiguous drama, in which Francis Hardy, Friel’s faith healer, goes town to town plying his mystical trade, the PICT caravan first took it to Wheeling, Fairmont, Brownsville, a couple of Pittsburgh Irish pubs and the Byham Theater.
Then they took it home to Ireland, doing one-nighters in Macroom and Listowel, Kiltimagh and Ballybofey. I saw them in Kilkenny — Bingo and company bringing Irish mysticism to the Irish, stirring the spiritual springs of ritual and faith. Something odd, mysterious or miraculous happens in “Faith Healer,” like what could happen when Bingo met just the right role.
Mainly, Bingo lived for the joy of life. Perhaps not having a spouse or children left him freer to take only those roles that interested him, never those he “ought” to because they were with a more prestigious theater or paid better. But he also earned that freedom by working hard during the day so he could play even harder at night.
Whether you account his heroism Joycean or Homeric, he chose his own journeys. We who were privileged to travel with him part of the way, whether as co-workers, audience members or friends, were many times blessed.