BINGO Unit – Team Mess

Overview

Mariska Hargitay, Ice-T, Don Johnson, Chief Wiggum, Turner, Hooch — roll them all together and you get BINGO Unit, a new work from Team Mess that rewards our greediness for crime dramas by letting us sink further into one. Their interactive theatre/film/game/everything experience is an almost heart-hurtingly good improvement on the classic formula — like a cronut is to a donut, to put it in official police words.

In a set-up modelled on studio back-lots, participants get to dust for fingerprints, kick in doors, go on stakeouts, eat donuts (no, really), study lineups, solve mysteries and enter a courtroom standoff. Team Mess are fondly counting off the cliches (bingo!) that we can't help but know from lives lived in proximity to television. The work was a huge success at last year's Next Wave Festival in Melbourne, gaining the group a Green Room Award nomination in the category dedicated to Creative Agency for Audiences (ie audience interaction that is not scary, not forced and not pointless).

BINGO Unit is part of Performance Space's Show Off season of experimental works that have made a strong impression at their recent premieres. The River Eats is a costume- and multimedia-based journey with a loveable monster that too was a hit at Next Wave, while I'm Your Man, set entirely in a boxing gym, was one of the unforgettable highlights of 2012 at Sydney's Belvoir.

Photo by Lucy Parakhina.