Beneva Fruitville’s farewell: Iconic Sarasota drag queen is moving on
In her popular drag queen bingo shows, Beneva Fruitville has never been shy about sharing her opinions about herself, her audience and the world with a caustic joke, a song or a sermon, and she’s not holding back as the actor who brought her to life prepares to say farewell to Sarasota.
After 18 years in Sarasota, Berry Ayers has made a “refreshing but also scary” decision to move on after a final drag queen bingo performance Sunday night and explore opportunities away from Sarasota, where her life has gone through many transitions, from an ensemble actor to a local drag superstar and, more importantly, from male to female.
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Ayers has become concerned that artists are being priced out of Sarasota and she is worried about new Florida laws she says will make the lives of LGBTQ+ people more challenging and potentially dangerous.
She is not sure where the next few months will take her after she spends some time at “home” with her mother in central Florida.
Ayers moved from New York back to Florida in 2004 to help take care of her mother. She thought it would be temporary, but an audition for a production of “Chicago” at the Golden Apple Dinner Theatre in downtown Sarasota led to a long association with that theater and more opportunities.
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Beneva Fruitville: A legend was born
A few years later, Ayers was cast in “La Cage aux Folles,” the actor’s first time doing drag for an extended period of time. During the run of the show, Ayers and other cast members were asked to perform in drag for a benefit for CAN Community Health, an AIDS support organization.
She already had her drag name picked out. She came up with Beneva Fruitville on her way to a rehearsal in a dance studio near the intersection of Beneva and Fruitville roads in Sarasota.
“I said that sounds like a drag name and it became my nickname with the other actors, so when it came to picking a drag name for the benefit, that’s what I went with,” she recalled. “I thought it was funny and had a Sarasota twist to it.”
A legend was born.
Beneva was based on all the women Ayers grew up with attending a Southern Baptist church, women who wore “big hair, flashy makeup and their best Sunday dress."
Everybody was trying to outdo each other,” Ayers said. “I loved the dichotomy of the poor humble servant of God next to the person with 14 gold chains around her neck and a gold ring on every finger, who had been out drinking and cursing and telling dirty jokes on Saturday night.”
That’s why in a performance of Beneva Fruitville’s Drag Queen Bingo Bonanza, she might chastise an audience member and follow it with a sweet, “But Jesus loves you.”
“That’s what they do in church. They’ll tell you you’re going to hell, but then say Jesus loves you,” she said.
Gradually, more offers for drag performances came in, including one to lead a drag show at a gay bar.
“I got a little nervous. I had never done a drag show by myself,” she recalled. Ayers knew Beneva was different because she was a trained singer who sang live and rarely lip-synced on stage. (Ayers is a graduate of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music).
But the offers made her realize that “If I really tried I could make this into a cute little side thing, which helped between gigs as an actor.”
Branding Beneva Fruitville
And Ayers made sure that people knew the name Beneva Fruitville.
“I started social media branding myself before that was even a thing. I made logos, learned to do press releases, and then bingo came along,” Ayers said.
Drag queen bingo started at the former Canvas Cafe in the Towles Court neighborhood, until the raucous laughter from sometimes profane jokes drew noise complaints from neighbors. Beneva was part of the cast. “We got shut down by the city,” Ayers said.
The show moved to a bar called Horse Feathers, ironically, located in the same spot as McCurdy’s Comedy Theatre, where she eventually found a longtime home for Beneva Fruitville’s Drag Queen Bingo Bonanza.
Beneva brought bingo nights to the Golden Apple in 2010, which helped keep the struggling theater going for a time. Then it moved to the Players Centre in 2012, before Ayers partnered in 2015 with Laura Daniel Gale as a producer and moved to McCurdy’s.
Gale had launched Black Diamond Burlesque in 2010 and got to know Beneva, who occasionally was featured in the shows. Gale had just formed her own LDG Productions when Ayers looked for help in booking Beneva’s shows.
The final Drag Queen Bingo Bonanza, at 8 p.m. July 31, is sold out.
“Beneva is irreplaceable. The show is all her, despite our amazing supporting cast (Tamiami Trails and Karma Kandlewick),” Gale said. “The show is Beneva and Beneva is the show.”
Personal discoveries
At first, Beneva was another role that Ayers played. She just happened to wear makeup, wigs and a dress and have a sassy demeanor.
But the more she appeared as Beneva, the more the character evolved, and Ayers started changing with her.
“I was discovering new parts and pieces of myself through the character. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed going out after the show, still in drag, still in Beneva wear. I remember people saying ‘You’re so pretty’ and I was feeling the fantasy of what it would be like to be a woman, even though there was always the knowledge in the back of my head that I would take it all off at the end of the night.”
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Over time, Ayers said those thoughts shifted
“It started leading into ‘what would it look like if I didn’t take it off at the end of the night?’ I explored different ways of trying it out in my home,” she said.
While dealing with depression, a therapist asked Ayers “what is the one thing that makes you happy right now” and it didn’t take a second for the actor to say, “Being in drag. I told her that I wish I had Beneva’s freedom. I wish I had her strength. Nothing gets to her,” Ayers recalled of his conversations with his therapist.
“And she said, ‘Wait a minute. It’s all you. She’s not this other being. You are her. You can be her.’ That was a ‘comes the dawn’ moment.”
Every trans person has a different story about realizing their gender identity. Some know from childhood; others, like Ayers, come to a discovery later in life.
“Every single person’s journey is different. I don’t necessarily believe I was born in the wrong body, but transition at this point in my life has made me feel the most comfortable in my skin that I have ever felt. That helps my mental health,” she said.
“I’m very proud of the life I lived as a gay man for 44 years. I’ll be 47 in September. For 40ish years, I identified as a gay man. I look back and I achieved a lot, had great successes and don’t want to negate that. I’ve had lovers, traveled the world, saw the country and I had huge career highlights. None of that is something that I want to ignore. It’s all a part of me, what led me to this point.”
Keeping busy in theater
After the Golden Apple years, Ayers took a full-time position with the Players Centre for Performing Arts, leading its studio program for young people. She also worked backstage and directed productions including “Carousel” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” choreographed shows like “A Chorus Line” and was musical director of others.
In 2016, she got to play a different drag performer, Zaza, the starring character in the musical “La Cage aux Folles.” Three years later, also at the Players Centre, she portrayed another bucket list character, Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray.”
Both roles are traditionally played by men in drag. Ayers still identified as a man during the run of both musicals, though she began her gender transition shortly after the run of “Hairspray.”
“The way I approached Edna is not as a man playing a woman, but as a woman. It changed the way I looked at the world,” she said. “There was an endearing quality, a mothering quality to her.”
Other actors in those roles were playing the joke of a man in a dress “whereas I’m playing a straight up woman taking care of her kid who may not look like the typical mother. In a way that’s kind of how I look at my life. I may not look like your typical woman. I’m a broad person. I weigh nearly 300 pounds. I’m a large person with a football player’s build, but I have a soft side, a femininity that I can finally be proud of, that I get to explore and express on a daily basis now. That has been so freeing.”
Transitioning
While building a brand identity as Beneva Fruitville, Ayers has also been open and frank about all that she has gone through since beginning her transition. There are numerous Facebook posts with the details of how she is reacting to one drug or another, how different she feels since starting estrogen treatments and testosterone blockers, and how those broad shoulders don’t have the strength they once did.
Those treatments were preceded by six months of therapy sessions to “make sure that transitioning was the right thing.” A therapist diagnosed her with gender dysphoria and her treatment is medical transition.
There have been plenty of ups and many downs, including harassment from a local pastor who told her she was “going to hell because I’m living publicly as transgender.”
That has contributed to the idea of moving away. She is angry about the politics that led to several anti-gay laws being approved in the state Legislature, including the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill and the “Stop WOKE” Act, “which really changes the conversation we can have,” she said.
Watching fights over face masks at school board meetings also stirred some passionate feelings.
“I don’t get how we became so divided. And of course that divisiveness came into the LGBTQIA community.” She spends time meeting with queer youth through Sarasota’s ALSO Youth program (she serves as a board member) and recalls how progressive Sarasota has been in dealing with queer issues.
She also worries about Sarasota’s future as an arts community.
“When I got here, Sarasota was such an arts commune. It seemed like there was arts on every corner,” she said. But money has changed things.
“Buildings started to go up and they’re buying out the charm of it all. It’s really a sad tale of money ruining a charming town. I consider Sarasota my hometown because it’s the longest place I’ve lived anywhere. But I’m being run out, me the artist. This is not some colossal trans thing. Artists in Sarasota are being pushed out. Eventually, all the money people selling this charming city are going to realize it’s an empty shell of a town.”
Saying farewell
And she’s taking Beneva Fruitville with her. But she will be back.
“Think of me like the Cher Farewell Tour. You just know I’ll be back,” Ayers said. Before deciding to move, she had been hired as musical director of “The Miracle on 34th Street: A Live Musical Radio Play” at the Players Centre in December.
Gale said they will try to book some Beneva shows whenever Ayers is in town.
“Part of what makes her so beloved is this sort of openness and vulnerability that she has,” said Gale, who also became her manager. “There are other drag queens, other bingo shows, other performances and I’m sure there are other live singers in drag But she has this unapologetic, big-hearted way that she shares herself with her audience that sets her apart. There’s something about this character being unambiguously herself, that by the end of the show, you’ve gotten to know both Beneva and Berry. With the transition she’s become even more expressive about that.”
She also will continue to promote herself and perform online, something she developed that helped her financially through the pandemic when live theater was shut down.
Beneva’s arrival and rise coincided with a greater awareness of drag culture thanks to the growing popularity of “Ru Paul’s Drag Race,” a show Ayers hopes might cast Beneva at some point. She has attracted all kinds of audiences – young, older, gay, straight, couples, girls nights.
“I tried to foster, even with my caustic tongue, a ‘you’re welcome here’ type of environment, for others and weirdos,” Ayers said. “Anybody is welcome. We take everybody. It’s a ‘you’re one of us’ kind of feel. And yes, it is love through chastising. I always end my show with ‘We Are Family,’ because I do truly think at the end of the day, we are all one human family and we could be better if we just listened to each other and talked instead of yelling.”
Beneva Fruitville’s Drag Queen Bingo Bonanza
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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota drag queen Beneva Fruitville is hitting the road
