How crowds and spaces affect PigPen Theatre Company’s work

A play’s identity changes based on where you see it and whom you see it with. The same production seems different in a large, empty theatre than it does in a crowded basement, and that’s half the beauty of live performance. One way or another, everything and everyone makes an impact.

For proof, just look to PigPen Theatre Company’s production of The Nightmare Story. A dark fable about dreams that spring to life in the woods, the show premiered in a tiny downtown venue as part of 2010′s FringeNYC Festival. Until the end of the week, however, it’s playing at The Irondale Center, a massive converted church in Brooklyn.

The audience has been just as variable. Often, PigPen plays to adults who see theatre all the time, but on four Thursday afternoons, TDF has sponsored special matinees through its Stage Doors program. Those performances are for local students who almost never see shows.

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TDF’s Guide to Family-Friendly Performances will help

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF’s ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles.

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Somewhere between the wolf puppet and the collapsing kitchen wall, it becomes clear that Apple Cove is not a realistic play. Set in an eerily idyllic gated community, Lynn Rosen’s dark comedy follows a young married couple discovering trouble in paradise. With each revelation, their home literally falls apart, or explodes with rainbow-colored flowers, or gets raided by commandos from the neighborhood security unit.

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How an outsider director rose to Broadway fame

This fall, The Path to Broadway will ask artists and audiences to reflect on their first Broadway experiences. To read all the stories in this series, just go here.

If you were describing the “typical Broadway director,” then you might never mention Alex Timbers. After all, he’s made his name helming low-budget, high-concept shows like Gutenberg!: The Musical and artistic directing Les Freres Corbusier, an off-Off Broadway theatre that used robots in a production of Hedda Gabler and elementary school students in a Christmas pageant about Scientology. It’s hard to imagine him leaping from those back alleys to the Great White Way.

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