The PigPen Theatre Co. Breaks All the Rules

Sept. 25, 2015

They play music, so they must be a band. They appear in movies, so that means they’re actors, right? They’re quite funny, so maybe they’re a comic troupe – but wait, there they are onstage in an original play they created themselves. So, just how do you define PigPen Theatre Co.?

That’s the trick: you don’t.

FESTIVAL FIRST

The seven-person company met as freshmen at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama eight years ago.

PigPen’s Ryan Melia explained that their entire beginning was both fortuitous and a fluke.

“At school, they have a week off from classes where everyone has to turn a project in for a festival at the end of the week.

We’d all met in the acting school and we just kind of started up a project. We didn’t know what it was, so we randomly started calling it the pigpen.”

Their very first show included acting, music… and shadow puppets.

“It was a conglomeration from the very start,” Melia said.

SHARED INTERESTS

His collaborator Arya Shahi explained that the first performance was an eye-opener for the seven friends, who suddenly saw a whole lot of future potential.

“We kind of started out telling stories on stage, but realized we all had a lot of shared interests beyond acting: liking similar music, animation, a lot of things. So this project felt like a natural progression that grew on its own.”

“We didn’t know what we were trying to make, so we just followed our collective gut,” Melia added. “We had no rules to hinder us, so we used all of the tools that we had: acting, music, theater, comedy, all of it.”

DIVERSE DIRECTIONS

Actually, PigPen’s quickly-ascending reputation can be attributed to two things: talent and diversity, in that order.

Their Off-Broadway shows have been lauded as critic’s picks by the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and The Boston Globe.

Their debut album Bremen was highlighted in The Huffington Post’s Grammy preview, which sent sold-out crowds to PigPen’s live concerts; they later snagged a spot performing as part of Mumford and Sons’ Gentlemen of the Road touring concert festival.

They made their feature film debut – albeit brief – in the Meryl Streep film Ricki and the Flash, directed by Jonathan Demme, known for his work on such movies as Swing Shift, Philadelphia and Silence of the Lambs.

“They wanted actors that were also really a band,” Melia explained. “The funny thing is, we ended up being in the movie for only about 30 seconds, and they put other music over what we were doing, because what we played didn't work with the edit, but it was something we really wanted to do.”

SEVEN SIDEKICKS

Since they’re still “right in the middle of figuring out what we are,” as Malia put it, they’re open to pretty much any project they find interesting, in any one of the above disciplines.

“Some people think we’re a theater company, some see us on stage and focus on our music. I think what we’re labeled depends on how someone first finds us,” Shahi said.

“But whatever we’re doing, we stick together, really,” Melia added. “We decided long ago that all seven of us would work together.”

“Hmm…maybe next we’ll just do seven Shakespeare monologues,” Shahi laughed.

The PigPen Theatre Co. will be performing at the City Opera House in Traverse City on Friday, Oct. 9 at 8pm with special guests Morningsiders. For more information and tickets, visit cityoperahouse.org or call (231) 941-8082.