The guys of PigPen Theatre Co., seven Carnegie Mellon acting majors, have a lot to deal with tonight.

Nerves: This performance is their NYC debut, and they know the New York theater crowd can make or break careers.

Excitement: Their piece has been selected from more than 800 entries to be a part of the New York International Fringe Festival, the largest multi-arts festival in North America.

And now, panic: They are missing a crate of extension cords.

The cords are an integral part of their performance, because onstage they're technicians as well as performers, running to generate their own lighting effects with clip lights, lamps, and flashlights. Since the students first came together as freshmen in 2008, they have prided themselves on using the simplest tools in the most inventive ways-shadow-play, live music, puppetry, and miniatures are all hallmarks of productions by PigPen's Alex Falberg, Arya Shahi, Ben Ferguson, Curtis Gillen, Dan Weschler, Matt Nuernberger, and Ryan Melia. Weschler describes the "atmospheric performances" as "storytelling on a shoestring."

This performance isn't their first for a non-CMU audience; in addition to their showings at Playground, the School of Drama's annual festival of student work, they have twice performed at venues in Martha's Vineyard: first for a weekend at the Island Theatre Workshop in 2009 and then for a six-week residency at the Vineyard Arts Project last summer. All performances garnered glowing reviews. But this project, a reworking of their 2010 Playground piece, "The Nightmare Story," is their highest-profile show to date, and the fast pace of the Fringe Festival has everyone on edge.

As they search for the extension cords, every "Where are they?" sounds more frantic. After a few frenzied minutes, Melia discovers the crate just a few feet away. The group laughs and resumes prepping for the show, the first of five performances. Just before showtime, the actors gather for a pre-show ritual. Standing in a circle, hands in, they take a moment to marvel at their journey: Freshman year they were performing in a Purnell rehearsal space. Now, they are in Manhattan.

PigPen's hope is that audiences will be swept into the story. They are. By the final night, a sold-out crowd filters in and immediately begins to dance and clap along with the guys' instruments. The theater feels like a campfire. "We just got comfortable with our space," Gillen explains. "We trusted ourselves and the story that we wrote."

Fringe producers are won over by the show's youthful magic, awarding PigPen the festival's top honor for a play and inviting the troupe back to New York for an encore run.
-Olivia O'Connor (A'13)

Editor’s Note: PigPen became the first theatre company in the history of The New York City International Fringe Festival to win the Overall Excellence in a Production award two years in a row. “The Mountain Song” garnered the top honor in 2011 as did “The Nightmare Story” in 2010.

The Nightmare Story - Trailer from PigPen Theatre on Vimeo.