In light of their upcoming show, The Daily Cardinal had a chat with Matt Nuernberger, electric guitarist and keyboardist for the Pigpen Theatre Company, a theater troupe-cum-folk band with origins in Pittsburgh and New York City. When The Cardinal caught up with Nurenberger, he and the other members of the band were in Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest festival, a first time experience for the whole band.
“We’re kind of just going from concert to concert, checking out bands that friends had recommended,” he said. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen … it’s so original, so unique.”
When asked, Nurenberger explained how his band fit in with the festival’s roster.
“A lot of people have been asking what our style is,” he said, “and I would say it’s a little like, it’s a little bit of Americana, there’s a lot of vocal harmonies in the style of Crosby, Stills & Nash or something more contemporary like the Fleet Foxes, so I would say in terms of other bands and stuff like that, the vocal harmonies are probably what we’re kind of leading with, in terms of showcasing our band.”
Nurenberger went on further to explain the theatrical origins of the band.
“[Pigpen] started as a theater company. We all went to acting school at Carnegie Mellon, the Conservatory Acting Program, which is focused on acting all day. They break down the class into voice, speech, movement, so we were seven of us, in the band now, were all in class together.”
The inception of the Pigpen Theatre Co., according to Nurenberger, lay in a theater festival the drama school facilitated each year.
“The seven of us got together and wrote this 20-minute play that had like two folk songs that we made up and one was a cover, and we had a bunch of shadow puppetry and we really started billing ourselves as a theater company”
The company went on to perform at the New York Fringe Festival, where they gained recognition for their stories.
“We got some awards from the Fringe festival which helped us get a lot of attention,” Neurenberger said, “so we all moved to New York after we graduated and within about a year and a half we co-produced our first off-Broadway run.”
From their theater roots, Pigpen Theater Co. the band emerged after a few years of sole theatrical work.
“A lot of the songs that we’ve been touring around with—actually, most of them—are from our plays, so the band formed in a more serious sense like two years ago,” he said. “When, like, people were asking for us, to buy the music and we didn’t have it recorded anywhere.”
“So we started putting our heads together and decided that when we weren’t being a theater company we wanted to try being a band.”
When asked, Nurenberger explained what type of plays the company had cached in their oeuvre.
“We have about four or five stories, all original, and they’re just sort of mythic folktales and the way we kind of put those plays together, at least up to this point, is we’ll pick a region of the world.”
As an example, Nurenberger spoke about one of the company’s most popular plays, “The Old Man and The Old Moon.”
“Our most prominent piece, which we’ve done the most, is a play called ‘The Old Man and The Old Moon,’ which is sort of a British Isles kind of odyssey tale about this old man who fills up the moon with light, and that’s his job every day from the very beginning of time … one day his wife goes missing in search of an adventure and he has to leave the moon to wane, and the whole world sort of goes into chaos, and he goes on this seafaring adventure in search of his wife.”
Nurenberger explained that most of the Pigpen Theatre Co. plays deal with “epic journeys across the world in search of a loved one.”
He then went on to explain how interconnected music and theater is for the group.
“We kind of fill a lot of the plays with the songs we’re touring with now,” Nurenberger explained. “They’re not kind of in the musical theater sense where a character kind of steps out and sings about what’s, y’know, going on emotionally, they’ll be more like storytelling songs.”
Nurenberger also explained how the group used puppetry to add another layer of sophistication to the Pigpen experience.
“We do have a lot of shadow puppetry and found object puppetry … in 'The Old Man and The Old Moon,' we have this puppet of a dog the main character encounters and the dog is made out of like a mop and a Clorox bottle and it’s a very crude interpretation of a dog but the puppeteer who plays the dog is actually, he’s quite good, and so he endows this puppet with the spirit of a dog.”
Nurenberger also spoke about the relative newness the group has acclimating to live music performance in lieu of theatre productions.
“Every show’s a little bit different … we haven’t gotten to the point where we’re kind of putting any sort of theatrics into the music because we’re really trying to take both music and theater seriously, separately.”
Speaking further on music, Nurenberger spoke about how the band writes songs for the Company.
“It’s a very loose process in terms of the music where, y’know, we’ll try a couple things, a lot of the songs are very narrative driven or story based, so we’ll talk about the story a little bit … With the theater, I would say it’s just as collaborative.”
Nurenberger also explained what he think is his principal role in the band.
“I tend to think very visually, and a lot of the time I’ll wear the visual hat in terms of trying to put the picture together—if somebody has a song and somebody else has a piece of writing, I feel most comfortable in trying to facilitate how those two things work together in a visual way.”
To finish, Nurenberger spoke about his favorite Pigpen piece, a thrilling sounding bit of phantasmagoria.
“We have a story called ‘The Nightmare Story’ that we haven’t done for so long and it’s … the story of this boy whose mother every night before he goes to bed, instead of telling him really nice bedtime stories she tells him her nightmares,” Nurenberger said, “and one day he tells her he doesn’t want to hear her stories anymore because they scare him, and she stops telling them, and she goes into sort of this comalike state.
“All of her nightmares escape out of her mind, and they go and populate the world, and this boy has to go in search of this very rare medicinal flower in order to cure her, but he has to, y’know, go through and battle all and deal with all the nightmares and scary things that are our there in the world.
“It’s one of our darker plays,” Nurenberger said, “and I’m hoping someday we can return back to it at some point. I really want to be able to do it again.”
Pigpen Theatre Co. will be playing at The Frequency Thursday at 9 p.m. with special guests The Spring Standards.
