Six Degrees of Pig Iron

How To Get From Skateboarding to Taxidermy in One Simple Step.


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Published: Aug 27, 2008

'I can link Kevin Bacon to Pig Iron Theatre Co. in four steps: Bacon appeared in Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks. Hanks was in The Green Mile with David Morse. Morse starred in Hack, in which local acting legend Tom McCarthy guested. McCarthy acted in Arden Theatre Co.'s The Grapes of Wrath with Pig Iron Theatre Co. co-founders Quinn Bauriedel, Suli Holum and Dito van Reigersberg.

Whew.

Geoff Sobelle

Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl

But Bacon's not the only porcine-monikered performer who can play that game. In this year's Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe, Pig Iron's got a hand in so many shows, it'd be remiss not to tie them all together.

Not surprisingly, van Reigersberg leads the pack. With performer Daniel Rudholm, he is co-author of Pig Iron's own production — their eighth in the annual festival since 1997 — Sweet By-and-By, directed by fellow Pig Iron co-founder Dan Rothenberg. In this American première in collaboration with Sweden-based Teater Sláva, Rudholm plays legendary labor activist Joe Hill, performing rousing union songs that juxtapose the Swede's strong religious upbringing with the idealism and activism that defined his life — and death — in America.

"All of Pig Iron's projects start as personal projects," explains Rothenberg. "Love Unpunished was born in part from an idea of Geoff Sobelle's to make something out of nothing, and Poet in New York was Dito's obsession for several years before we made it." Pig Iron had wanted to work with Sláva Teater for years, and "the fact that Daniel was passionate about this material but not yet sure how to crack it seemed like the perfect opening for us."

Sweet By-and-By, Rothenberg continues, "attacks the Joe Hill story from an emotional and spiritual vantage point more than a political one," making it more than just another chapter in the continuing struggle for fairness and justice. "It's also a story of an immigrant voice creating a crucial vein of uniquely American music; stories of immigrants cut deeply in many parts of the world, but especially in our young country, which is still so remarkably open to immigration on one hand and so hostile to immigrants on the other."

But back to business. Van Reigersberg also performs in Nichole Canuso's Wandering Alice and Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey's Oedipus at FDR, for which James Sugg contributes sound design and music; Sugg also composed the music for Sebastienne Mundheim's Sea of Birds.

The women creating Wandering Alice and Oedipus at FDR are — of course — Pig Iron veterans. Choreographer and dancer Canuso and physical-theater virtuoso Delpech-Ramey performed in Pig Iron's 2002 metaphysical clown show Flop! Delpech-Ramey, an eight-year company member, won a Supporting Actress in a Musical Barrymore for their James Joyce Is Dead and So Is Paris. Her already sold-out show also features Pig Iron collaborators Corinna Burns and Hinako Arao; Pig Ironer Suli Holum co-wrote the text.

Holum, a Pig Iron performer from the company's nascent days at Swarthmore College, also wrote the script for Canuso's Wandering Alice, and Makoto Hirano (of Pig Iron's Pay Up and Love Unpunished) joins Canuso's dancers/actors in Wandering Alice, inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Japanese surrealist novelist Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Canuso is a 10-year member of the Bessie Award-winning troupe Headlong Dance Theater, whose co-founder, David Brick, co-directed the 9/11-inspired Love Unpunished with Rothenberg.

Still with us? The aforementioned Geoff Sobelle, a Pig Iron company member and three-time Barrymore Award nominee, teams with actress Charlotte Ford (Barrymore-nominated for Red Light Winter with Theatre Exile — the company founded by Nichole Canuso's dad, Joe, who directed Tom McCarthy in his popular one-man show, The Philly Fan, thus connecting this whole crowd back to Kevin Bacon — spooky, right?) to create and perform Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl, which blends stop-action animation with antique illusion in a doomsday fairy tale about humans hunted by taxidermied animals.

William Hebert (bottom-right

Wandering Alice

Actress Sarah Sanford (in Pig Iron's 2004 Obie Award-winning Hell Meets Henry Halfway) connects Pig Iron to Jeb Kreager (who co-founded New Paradise Laboratories) in that they're both appearing in The European Lesson, created by Norway's Jo Stromgren Kompani. Lighting designer James Clotfelter illuminated Chekhov Lizardbrain and Pig Iron's Queen musical Mission to Mercury, and lights Sweet By-and-By and Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl in this year's festival — yet another link!

Pig Iron artists will continue to intersect after the festival's finished: Sobelle, Sugg, van Riegersberg and Bauriedel reunite this fall in the New York City première of Pig Iron's Chekhov Lizardbrain.

So, even though its artists wander, Pig Iron never dies, says Rothenberg. "I was talking to Julia Stratton, a local sculptor and my landlord for the past seven years, about all the projects in the festival that James, Manu, Geoff, Suli and Dito are doing, and she said, 'You did it. You really did it. You told me you were trying to change the face of theater in Philadelphia, and now it's happened.'

"I'm proud that Pig Iron was able to bring a lot of these artists to Philadelphia for the first time, and that they've made a home here and are making incredible work here, both with Pig Iron and outside of it. We've always considered our company an 'open marriage.' ... We never wanted to get stuck working only together, never changing, never learning new things. There are challenges and heartbreaks with all the schedule conflicts that arise, but better to have rough change than stagnation."

(m_cofta@citypaper.net)

Visit livearts-fringe.org for showtimes.