It was freshman year when seven Carnegie Mellon School of Drama students gathered to figure out how they might tell a compelling ghost story. They had a week before they would present that show to their peers in a festival called Playground — and they have been playing together ever since.
Where: City Theatre, 1300 Bingham St., South Side.
When: Nov. 11-Dec. 3. 7 p.m. Tuesday; 1 and/or 7 p.m. Wednesday; 8 p.m. Thursday-Friday; 1, 5:30 p.m., and/or 9 p.m. Saturday; and 2 or 7 p.m. Sunday. (No performance on Thanksgiving.)
Tickets: $38; 412.431.CITY (2489) or citytheatrecompany.org. Discounted rush tickets for under age 30 ($15) and seniors ($24), check the website.
Events: City Connects Happy Hour 5:30-7 p.m. Nov. 15. Meet the City Connects partners for the 2017-18 season in the Gordon Lounge. For a full schedule of events, visit citytheatrecompany.org.
For the next 10 years, the talented seven have traveled the country as PigPen Theatre Co., playing concerts or sharing their unique brand of storytelling, featuring original music, puppetry, sound and lighting effects and whatever thrift-store find sparks their considerable imaginations.
The folk-pop band that is PigPen — Curtis Gillen, the lone Pittsburgher and a Chartiers Valley High alumnus, plus Ryan Melia, Dan Weschler, Ben Ferguson, Arya Shahi, Alex Falberg and Matt Nuernberger — has been heard at many Pittsburgh music venues since they graduated from CMU. But PigPen’s current residence at City Theatre marks their first visit as a theater troupe.
“The Old Man and the Old Moon” is a folktale that had its roots in their sophomore year, as a 25-minute show for CMU’s Playground.
“Like all the stories we've done so far, it started with a seed of an idea — a man whose job it was to fill the moon — and that was the jumping off point” said Mr. Melia, one of PigPen’s two redheads (narrator Nuernberger is the other). “So it was, here's the character, here's the circumstance. Everyone just started throwing stuff at it ... and as it is with everything, someone would bring in something that no one else knew about, like folktales that lived in the same world. And we wrote that in a week.”
It was returning to create a Playground piece in sophomore year when “we were this collective and decided to keep at it,” Mr. Gillen said. “It spread to working together in the summer and then junior year, and it snowballed into this little theater company of seven.”
“We started with theatrical pieces … and I think the music was a much bigger surprise,” Mr. Shahi said of PigPen as a band. “The first two years we were just about, ‘How do we create plays?’ And the music grew out of that.”
All the while, they never let go of “The Old Man and the Old Moon.”
They have refined and expanded the show through performances in New York, Chicago, Boston and, most recently, San Diego’s Old Globe Theater. Foley effects were added when sound designer Mikhail Fiksel came aboard. The creative team also includes fellow CMU alumni Lydia Fine (scenography, puppetry) and Bart Cortright (scenography). Stuart Carden, a frequent City Theatre guest, directs.
“We knew after we left school, we wanted to come back to this piece and give it our full attention, to fill out the world, stretch our acting muscles and our writing, and work on creating a really substantial piece of theater,” Mr. Melia said.
"A perfect combination of original music, stunning shadow puppetry, and vigorous physical comedy. ... it's like watching child geniuses at play," The New Yorker review said.
Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times that his guest asked him, "What do you call this kind of theater?" He answered, "For brevity's sake, let's just call it a really fine time."
The PigPen seven have come back to Pittsburgh with gratitude for the foundation they received in the place they first met.
“If it weren’t for Carnegie Mellon, not only would we not have met, but we wouldn’t have been given the opportunity to create this type of theater,” said Mr. Weschler. “They continued to be incredibly supportive during our time there. They even sent us to our first show at the New York Fringe Festival.”
That’s when folks outside of Pittsburgh started to become aware of PigPen. They have twice taken the top prize at NY Fringe, in 2010 and ‘11.
Mr. Shahi said they were told that CMU had never seen a group of acting students try to form a company while they were still in school, “But whatever you guys need, let us know.”
By the time they were seniors, the troupe did not fit CMU’s traditional showcase of talent, in which singers and actors deliver songs and monologues for industry pros. So they and the university improvised — PigPen partnered with the Barrow Street Theater in lower Manhattan through their NY Fringe contacts, and CMU helped the company send out the showcase invitations.
Sometime before they left school, they began calling themselves “PigPen.” The “Theatre Co.” came later. When asked, “Why PigPen?,” his bandmates chuckled and turned to Mr. Ferguson.
“It was kind of incidental at the time. … We all grew our beards a little longer, bathed a little less, and here we are,” Mr. Ferguson said.
Mr. Falberg, who came to school having studied classical piano, took up the banjo, the better “to complement the storytelling and the band side of things that emerged out of us working together.”
He plays the restless wife of the old man (Mr. Melia) whose job it is to keep the moon filled with light in “The Old Man and the Old Moon.” Mr. Nuernberger is the narrator who bids the audience welcome.
Regular City Theatre-goers will notice that the Mainstage proscenium has been repurposed as a wide-open space with rustic wooden platforms as the newest playground for PigPen.
“It is this show that defined our aesthetic, our way of telling a story, because this show is so universal that people have a tendency of leaning in very early,” Mr. Shahi said. “There's a really wonderful sense in the room, right from the beginning of Matt's beautiful narration at the top that really invites people in.”
Patrons walk into a PigPen “folk jam,” said Mr. Falberg, who added, “We hope the play has started the minute people come into the space. We always use the words ‘living room,’ like people feel they are in a home, all here to listen to a story.”
“I think 'The Old Man and the Old Moon' is our flagship show because it's the most, pound for pound, PigPen experience,’ Mr. Shahi said. “The story has resonated in a huge way.”
Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960. Twitter: @SEberson_pg.
First Published: November 9, 2017, 5:00 a.m.