Mining for Meaning

Hey, How'd You Get That Funny Name?
by John K. Frisbee, Pig Iron Director of Development

If you’re ever in the mood for a confusing three or four minutes, try and get one of Pig Iron Theatre Company’s three co-founders to explain why they chose the name “Pig Iron.” After 11 years of living with the name, a “standard” line of reasoning hasn’t quite been established. You choose a name because you like the feel of it, like the way it runs together (a Southern-accented friend of ours once addressed a letter to “Pig Arn”), and you’ve explored some of the name’s historical connotations. There is a serious and considered process that goes into naming a company; it's by no means arbitrary. Even so, 11 years later you end up saying “Well, what did I mean back then?”

Firstly, “pig iron” has very little to do with pigs themselves. We’ve sometimes been known to use a swine-related pun or two at part of our annual fundraiser cabaret, but we occasionally lament the fact that we're so frequently associated with the world's third-smartest animal.

In any case, since you ask, pig iron is raw iron, the immediate product of smelting iron ore with coke and limestone in a blast furnace. The traditional mold makes a large runner with numerous attached ingots, creating a look similar to that of a bunch of piglets suckling on a sow. Pig iron’s pretty brittle, so it needs to be re-melted to alter the carbon content, after which it can get molded any which way (your cast-iron skillet, your Amish wagon wheel) into the formidably firm and heavy iron tools we know and love.

One of the reasons for naming a theatre company “Pig Iron” is that pig iron was often used as a counterweight for scenery or drops used in a production; it’s also referred to constantly and somewhat enigmatically in Mamet’s American Buffalo. In a way, pig iron is a kind of potential energy – it can be molded, re-formed, cast or discarded. It needs an artisan or an animating spirit to make it into something, but for the moment it has the potential to be almost anything. It works as a label for a company whose productions begin as a virtual tabula rasa – just a space, a director, some designers, some actors, and a lot of ideas.

We also love the idea of theatre as something that’s “handmade” – a singular work of artisanship, formed from rude materials, with a potential for surprise beyond that of your standard-issue cultural product. So many theatre productions are caught up in depicting an authentic reality; there’s an innate fear of letting the strings show too much. The elements that make up a production – the acting, the lighting, the sets – aren’t allowed to become works of art in and of themselves, instead becoming subsidiary tools used to create a simulation of human life. We try to use these elements to express rather than to tell, and we don’t try to hide them. Maybe this is another perspective on the Pig Iron name – letting the raw materials shine through, even as they’re subsumed within the larger artistic whole.

The company gets the odd call from folks who somehow miss the “Theatre” and mistake us from a smelting plant. Our managing director has a saved message of a confused – if still quite insistent – gentleman trying to convince us to go in on his scheme to sell pig iron to Egypt. Troublingly, a Phillies minor-league affiliate has recently been redesignated as the “Lehigh Valley IronPigs.” Somehow, we’ve been getting calls asking for baseball tickets, and we’ve generally failed at selling these people on experimental theatre as an alternative to hot dogs and domestic drafts. There’s also a British hard-rock group named Pig Irön...

...(question: how exactly did the umlaut become a signifier of rock-n-roll awesomeness?), but we’ve yet to have a run-in with them or their fans.

As quirky as a name sometimes seems, it inevitably returns to dictate certain particulars of your future. Our logo – the surrealist three-pulley system that’s featured on our t-shirts and our letterhead – alludes to the connection with simple theatrical processes. While some experimental ensembles are known for brash, technically brilliant, hyper-modern work, Pig Iron’s niche seems to be a middle ground between looking-forward and looking-back. While our work always tries to be formally innovative, it retains a connection to the earthiness of old-world theatre traditions.

(Ed. – In retrospect, the last sentence makes us sound a little more like a boutique coffee company than a performance ensemble. Oh, well.)