Navigating the Fringe: Pig Iron's Director of Development Stalks the Company During the Festival

by John Frisbee, PITC Director of Development

Every September, the Live Arts and Fringe Festivals roll around, and I plan on really diving in and soaking up the ocean of cultural activity happening all over Philly. I want to see 35 shows, hear the buzz in the box office, get caught up in the collective adrenalin rush of a festival atmosphere.

What happens? I choke, essentially. I see a couple of shows, then I retreat to my house or office, and watch TV, get some work done, and resume my somewhat hermit-like existence. Maybe I get lured out to the Fringe Cabaret one Saturday night, maybe I don’t. There are a few reasons for this: feeling overwhelmed; feeling sleepy; feeling broke (if I can be brutally honest, it’s cruel of the Festival to start on the day that my rent check is due.)

This year, I figured I’d give it another whirl. Since I’m a giant, obsessive dork, I gave myself a specific project: try to see everything that Pig Iron company members or collaborators were involved in. This had a few advantages, including sucking up to my bosses, seeing some really good performance work, and being able to tune out everyone who said “You absolutely have to go see [fill in any one of 83 different Fringe shows.]” Plus, my status as a Pig Iron employee absolves me of any requirement to be objective – which works out nicely, given that I have no critical faculty whatsoever and like pretty much everything.

I’d actually started out before the festival started, at Gas & Electric Arts’ Voices Underwater, featuring Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey, Pay Up alumna Leah Walton, and Love Unpunished sound designer Sean Mattio. Gas & Electric Arts is that rare theatre company that seems to have started performing fully-integrated, interesting productions from the get-go; last year’s Anna Bella Eema, by all accounts, was pretty awesome. Voices Underwater is set in an old plantation house in the American South; in the play, there are three co-existing planes of history occuring at once (the late Civil War, the 1920s, and the present). The work’s peculiary physical sensibility and elocution took some getting used to, but after a little while I gained an appreciation for the way Voices Underwater deals with a space that’s haunted by both the past and the future.

The first “real” Fringe show I went to was Dilated, a short (37 minutes, specified the program) piece performed at a gallery in Old City. The performer/creators were Aram Aghazarian, Enrique Villacis, and Dylan Clements – all members of the giant Pay Up troupe at the ’05 festival. The characters – a wine-swilling gallery owner who moved like a spider, a terrifyingly shy South American conceptual artist, and a gallery assistant-cum-amateur psychologist – were hilarious, and extraordinarily well-drawn.

The next day, I headed allll the way up to the Icebox project space, which sits near the Fishtown/Kensington border above Northern Liberties. (Note to readers: do not try to walk here from 20^th and South. It is tiring.) Performing there were Subcircle, the Jorge-and-Nicole Cousineau-led dance and design collective; their piece, Still Unknown, allowed 8 different artists to create a performance installation that explored a question left unanswered in this too-much-information age. Among the participants: Company member James Sugg; Love Unpunished’s Makoto Hirano, and Hell Meets Henry Halfway designer Matt Saunders. I love it when a performance-based medium allows itself to be organized like a visual-art show; ask an open-ended question, and then get a bunch of talented people to answer it in whatever way they see fit. The result was endearingly discursive and loosey-goosey, and featured an astounding amount of good design – set, sound, video, and lighting included.

I took a short hiatus on Sunday and Monday – the house wasn’t gonna clean itself – and came back for //AUTOPILOT//, directed by former Pig Iron Managing Director Lars Jan, on Tuesday. Set in an even tinier gallery space than Dilated, the play – apparently an adaptation of “The Little Prince,” which I haven’t read – shows a downed Desert Storm pilot fighting off demons while waiting to be rescued in Southern Iraq or Kuwait. The show is scary-intense and surreal; having that much madness let loose in a small, loud space was an experience worth having.

Thursday featured a ridiculous double-bill: P’s and Q’s, directed by Lee Etzold (Flop), and starring Sarah Sanford (Love Unpunished, Henry, Lucia Joyce Cabaret, Shuteye) and Pig Iron co-founder Dito van Reigersberg (pretty much everything), among others. This was followed up by James Sugg’s The Sea, a maritime rock-n-roll song-cycle performed at the Wilma at the ungodly hour of 10:30 PM. P’s – which pretty much sold out its entire run – was a study of dinner-party etiquette, integrating sound clips from ‘50s instructional videos and occasional dance breaks. Words like “fun” and “delightful” seem a little shallow and condescending, but they definitely apply here – necessarily, the piece was extremely precise and meticulous, but at the same time radiated a surprising amount of warmth and charisma.

I grabbed a double shot of espresso on my way over to The Sea; at 10:30 PM on a weeknight, you could take me to see a band of brontosauri playing ‘80s metal songs, and I’d probably still fall asleep. Fortunately, The Sea was really good. And really loud, which helped. James’ Tom-Waitsian orchestrations were played by a band of guys in yellow fishermen’s overalls and caps; the whole thing was like a twisted inversion of Moby Dick, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, and The Perfect Storm (with James as a more believable captain than George Clooney). There was a sprinkle of crowd-participation moments and unbelievable video projections (giant hurricanes, semaphore flags, etc.), rendered all the more impressive by the knowledge that James was working on at least 17 other Fringe shows while writing these songs.

I managed to miss Nichole Canuso’s Fail Better over the weekend – other probably-great shows I skipped included Headlong Dance Theater’s Cell (sold out); Jeb Kreager’s The Contest (flaked); and contemporary dance superstar Emio Greco’s Hell (limited finances). I did go to see The Hollow Earth – a Geoff Sobelle-directed cabaret piece about a nautical cult journeying to the inside of our planet, which contains a sun that shines 24/7 and is home to such magical creatures as the “lambear”…oh, the hell with it. Describing something this bizarre doesn’t do it justice. Suffice to say that Bradford Trojan, who wrote all of the songs, has quite a knack for writing a great hook to an unbelievably weird lyric, and that any show with a donut communion is just fine with me.

My final show was Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford’s Amnesia Curiosa, which was set in the original operating amphitheater at the Pennsylvania Hospital. The surprisingly small circular room was incredibly cool – I would have probably shelled out ten bucks just to see someone read from a phone book in the space. As evidenced by all wear bowlers, their 2003 piece which has become somewhat of an international sensation, Geoff and Trey have a remarkable arsenal of theatrical tricks at hand; in places, Amnesia relied on a similar level of inventiveness and physical mastery. What I didn’t expect from the piece, though, was the strong storytelling and sense of personal richness and detail that they brought to this work; only in rare instances do I expect experimental theater to be so open and generous to its audience.

So: one happy final thought is that every show I attended was completely sold out, including some non-Pig-Iron-related shows that I’m omitting here because you don’t want to read a 3,000-word post. This says a ton about the audience that has coalesced around experimental and ensemble theatre in town; it also shows that all of the Fringe staff and all of the performers who hustled all over town marketing their shows did a pretty good job. A heartening side note is that the festival was also overwhelminingly local this year – out of 29 shows in the Live Arts Festival, 20 of them were developed by Philadelphia-based artists. (A brief self-promotional moment: an eye-popping 12 of the shows featured Pig Iron company members or ex-collaborators.) This is a fantastic affirmation that there’s a mature, self-sustaining performing-arts community here in Philly committed to doing excellent work in town.

Big thanks to JJ Tiziou (www.jjtiziou.net) for taking excellent photographs, and for letting us use them for this article.