Seems Pigpen Theatre Company was artfully primitive right from the start. According to a meet-the-artists essay in the program for Pigpen’s The Old Man and the Old Moon—running now at Writers’ Theatre—the company members were freshmen at Carnegie-Mellon University when they did their first work together, a short piece about a man hunting a killer bear. The school “gave us the keys to this multi-million dollar theater with all the latest gadgetry,” Pigpenner Arya Shahi is quoted as saying, “and we made a show out of puppets and cardboard.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A little more than six years later, the same low-tech conceit applies. Old Moon unfolds on rough wood planks. The scrims for its shadow-puppet interludes consist of plain white sheets. And some of the lights (electric, not tallow) sit in housings made of wine corks, hung from what looks like lengths of hemp rope. The seven actors affect Irish brogues and play homey music on homey instruments—banjos, hollow-body guitars, an accordion, a fiddle—although there’s also an out-of-place electric bass. Shahi is the percussionist, most often banging a tom-tom slung from his neck.
Nowhere is the confusion harder to ignore than in the narrative itself. It starts out well enough. Devised by the ensemble as a whole, Old Moon is a fable about an old couple who’ve lived a great long time in comfortable isolation. In fact, you could say they’ve lived that way since time immemorial, since they can no longer remember how they came to be who they are. One thing for sure is that they inhabit a physics-free, mythic dimension, where the moon doesn’t go through monthly phases but remains full all the time. It also seems to be constructed kind of like a water balloon. And a leaky water balloon at that: liquid light drips slowly out of a small hole in its skin. The Old Man’s job is to collect the lost light in a bucket and pour it back into the moon through an opening at the top.
Through 11/10: Tue-Wed 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM Writers’ Theatre 325 Tudor Court Glencoe 847-242-6000pigpentheatre.com $35-$70
