Each night, an old man that lives on a cliff fills up the moon with liquid light. He and his wife have been doing the same routine for so long, they’ve forgotten who they are and why they started filling up the moon in the first place.
One day, the wife hears a song across the ocean and leaves to find out where it’s coming from. The old man wakes up, finds his wife gone and decides to abandon his duty filling up the leaky moon to go find her.
“Then disaster befalls the earth,” said actor and singer Curtis Gillen. “Really, it’s a mythical tale of how the moon became the way it is now, waxing and waning.”
That’s the premise of "The Old Man and the Old Moon," a musical play by PigPen Theatre Company. It’s an original show filled with folk tunes, powerful harmonies, and shadow puppetry.
The seven-member theater company met when they were freshmen at Carnegie Mellon University in 2007. It includes Pittsburgh native Gillen, Alex Falberg, Arya Shahi, Ben Ferguson, Dan Weschler, Matt Nuernberger, and Ryan Melia.
Gillen said the show demands imagination. Every sound is created onstage. Every prop is made out of recycled material.
“A pot and garlic crusher can be a rooster, only if you allow it to be,” Gillen said.
An audience favorite is the lovable shaggy dog, Lucy. Her face is a Clorox bottle and her body is a thick stringy mop, controlled by an actor’s hand.
The show highlights the cast’s versatility with a do-it-yourself brand of storytelling: everyone plays an instrument, takes on a character or jumps behind a sheet to puppeteer. Artistic director Stuart Carden said the puppetry connects with the audience.
“The description I call of their work is lo-fi high-imagination,” Carden said. “So it’s like very simple things, but it activates your imagination in exceptional ways.”
Carden said he enjoys the scenes that cut suddenly from human characters delivering the narrative, to a view of the shadow screen.
“That ability to go to extraordinary places in an instant using every day, very simple items like a flash light and some cardboard [creates] a real sense of wonderful play that this type of storytelling can do,” Carden said.
The ensemble has been working on "The Old Man and the Old Moon" since their CMU theater days. Carden said years ago, as a professor, he helped the guys focus the story to explore themes like duty, familiarity, and change.
“The play really addresses that quandary that we all have throughout our lives in big and small ways,” Carden said. “When do we hold onto what’s comfortable and the things that we know and routine and when do we step out into something new and why do we step out into the unknown?"
Gillen said the group’s nontraditional approach to storytelling lets them to take risks they might not have in a more classical theater setting. Even the stage looks different than in other productions.
“We struck all of the curtains, we’re taking anything away that makes it feel like you’re in a theater.”
The Old Man and the Old Moon opens Friday, Nov. 17 at the City Theatre and runs through Dec. 3. They’re also offering a shadow puppet workshop on Sunday, Nov. 26.
When they’re not onstage, PigPen Theatre Company performs as a band, and will appear at Club Café next week.
Byham Charitable Foundation is an underwriter of City Theatre, as well as 90.5 WESA.
