At Carnegie Mellon University, seven freshmen teamed up for the 2007 Playground Festival, an annual opportunity for drama students to forgo their regular classes for one week in order to create and rehearse a theatrical work to perform that weekend. Unsure where to begin, the septet leaned on improvisation; following the theater game that so many play as children, the group sat in a circle and created a story as each person added one sentence after another. That tale became their first play, “The Hunter and Bear”; and those seven theatermakers became PigPen Theatre Co.
PigPen has been making theater as a company and writing music as a band for 17 years (13 of those since graduating college). Their album “Bremen” was named the number 10 album of the year in 2012 by Huffington Post; they starred in Trevor Nunn’s musical adaptation of “Pericles” in 2016 and premiered a musical adaptation of “The Tale of Despereaux” at San Diego’s Old Globe in 2018. And in 2024, the new musical “Water for Elephants” — for which they wrote the score — earned seven Tony Award nominations.
Depending on the project, PigPen is a troupe of actors or instrumentalists or composer-lyricists or puppeteers or playwrights — or all of the above. No matter their creative role, a signature of PigPen’s process is group devising. And the alchemy of its seven individual personalities (and skills) pours into their art.
According to the troupe’s members, Ben Ferguson is “the Raphael of the Ninja Turtles” — loyal, grounded and fiery. Alex Falberg is the group’s dad. (“He takes care of us in a way that he is constantly looking after us as well as guiding us into becoming better young gentlemen.”) Matt Nuernberger is the glue. (“When things start to fray at the edges, Matt sticks us back together.”) Curtis Gillen is the fun-loving optimist. (“On our best day, PigPen is all operating at Curtis’ level of having a good time and genuinely enjoying what we do.”) Arya Shahi is the bold one. (“He swings big and he keeps teaching us to swing big.”) Ryan Melia is the explorer; he experiments and comes up with the ideas no one has heard before. Dan Weschler is the craftsman “to a degree that is disturbing”; “we’ve all benefited from Dan’s ability to break down the ephemeral and the surreal into real things in an artistic sense.”
The seven of them are like fish in a river: They move in the same direction at the same pace and every so often one leaps for a closer look. They are a mix of quirky and quiet, pensive and goofy, pragmatic and idealistic, resolute and fun, alternative and Americana.
With every project, they rely on one another’s strengths and natural affinities in a process of egalitarian creation. Their first step on every show is a meeting in which every member brings in one idea based on a piece of the story they’re drawn to, “whether it’s a seed of a scene or song, or a whole song,” Melia said. “That’s the way each project has come to fruition.”
On the whole, PigPen gravitates stories with a vast scope (“We were all kids who grew up watching Pixar movies and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and had this love of epic storytelling, but also very heartfelt storytelling,” said Weschler). But they prefer to use lo-fi methods — hand puppets, shadow puppets, original music — to create the worlds of their plays. (“The Hunter and the Bear” had been heavily influenced by the Australian theater company Suitcase Royale and its scrappy, imaginative style.)
“Water for Elephants” fit that bill. In the case of this musical, PigPen wrote the music and lyrics and influenced the full production as part of the show’s creative team, which also includes director Jessica Stone and book writer Rick Elice.
