A little more than a year ago, Philadelphia and Pig Iron lost a great friend and a great artist. 

Hiroshi Iwasaki was something else.  He was tireless.  He was formidable.   He was possessed of a unique sensibility when it came to form and color.  And he had a wicked, wicked sense of humor. 

Hiroshi worked on five Pig Iron creations.  He first collaborated with us on a small series of Shakespeare experiments called NEWBORN THINGS in 1999 - he was a collector of unusual objects, in his house and at the prop storage out at Bryn Mawr College, where he worked for many years.  I remember him coming into rehearsal for a day, and then somehow, in a couple of days, creating a landscape of trunks, ropes, and a clawfoot bathtub for our mash-up of Ellis Island stories and the Tempest. 

We worked together again at the Arden when they commissioned our first children's play, THE SNOW QUEEN.  That's when I met Hiroshi the fierce artist with that biting sense of humor;  at one point he said to me: “If you change this design, then you are the Snow Queen!”  That's not something you hear every day.  

We were lucky to keep working Hiroshi over the next few years: he designed a melted Eiffel Tower, its spire bent to accommodate the ceiling, and a stage decorated with wallpaper cherubs for THE LUCIA JOYCE CABARET.  Together with co-designer Quinn Bauriedel, he assembled a unique “hidden” set for our 2006 remount of MISSION TO MERCURY, pulling architectural elements from the Mandell Theater into the design so it seemed to be just an abandoned theater, with a few tricks up its sleeve.  And he saved the day when we suddenly needed a set designer for our collaboration with Joe Chaikin, SHUT EYE.  He created the iconic ladder that Geoff Sobelle and Sarah Sanford danced and spun on, the part of the show that everyone remembered for years to come. 

That really was Hiroshi's specialty: saving the day.  I think he was happiest when he was up against it, making masterpieces on a shoestring.  He certainly had the talent and the wherewithal to spend his career at large theaters, and he had his share of costume and set designs presented in Philadelphia and beyond.  But you could tell he just didn't care that much about the trappings of an “approved” career - he was that artist who genuinely didn't give a damn if the press or the public thought a project was worthy of a high profile.  He kept making masterpieces on a shoestring with his longtime collaborator Mark Lord at Big House Plays & Spectacles; with Headlong Dance Theater; and, luckily for us, with Pig Iron.

There were several unforgettable sets he created that stay with me — both because of the performances that they were married to and because sometimes Hiroshi's sets come with their own story.  I remember his transformation of an abandoned theater into a shadowy hotel for Big House's RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE - one of those difficult plays that stretch the audience's patience and imagination, but handled with such confidence and artistry that you had to succumb to it one way or another.   Heavy rains that September were flooding the performance space, but that wasn't going to stop Hiroshi: he built a functioning dyke in the theater, somehow, on the concrete floor.   You had to shake your head in disbelief.

But he made it look easy; you had to get up close to see the incredible level of detail.  My favorite Hiroshi story is about exactly that.  Back in the 90s, a lot of companies were using the unfinished basement called “Smoke,” a long corridor of crumbling cement walls, stenciled with red numbers for some long-forgotten purpose.  Big House used it to incredible effect for their seminal production of ENDGAME with Maggie Siff and Pierce Bunting.  When Pig Iron took up residence a year later, imagine our surprise to find, after working in the basement for a few weeks, that when you leaned against one of these concrete walls, it gave a little bit, and had a hollow sound when you tapped it.

We leaned in close and saw that this wall was not a wall like the others.  It was a fake.  The ENDGAME team had required another concrete wall for their site-specific production, so Hiroshi made one out of drywall, and textured it, and painted it - you had to get as close as two feet away to see how he did it.  I used to play a game with friends who came to visit when we were rehearsing or after performances: “Do you see anything different about one of these walls?  No?  Look closer.  OK, look closer.  No?  One of these walls is fake.  Can you guess which one?  No, huh?  Knock with your hands.  How about that, huh?  Hiroshi Iwasaki, man!  Hiroshi Iwasaki did that!”

That wall stayed up for years and years, long after ENDGAME closed.  I imagine that half of the theater companies in there didn't even realize it was there; the other half made the same discovery as we did, breathed out in admiration, and saw no reason to take down this remnant of some lost production, this remarkable detail toiled over lovingly by some tremendous and unknown talent who didn't sign his name and was happy for some of his finest work to remain invisible. 

This remembrance is long overdue, of course.  We have missed Hiroshi for more than a year; he and his partner John were regulars at the Pig Iron benefit cabaret, from back in the days when it was at the Ethical Society, arriving early to sit up front.  It isn't the same without him. 

Dan Rothenberg

February, 2012

Below are some images of Hiroshi's designs for Pig Iron (click to enlarge):

THE SNOW QUEEN (1999)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

SHUT EYE (2001)

 

  

  

  

  

JAMES JOYCE IS DEAD AND SO IS PARIS: THE LUCIA JOYCE CABARET (2003)

 

  

  

  

  

  

MISSION TO MERCURY (2005)

  

Wow. That was a blast.

  

TWELFTH NIGHT meant a lot of firsts for us. Our first time sticking to an existing script. Our first show in the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, with the largest audiences we've ever had at the Live Arts Festival. Our largest professional cast, populated with Pig Iron regulars and revelatory newcomers. Our first Gypsy band, with an incredible group of multi-instrumentalists led by composer Rosie Langabeer. Two hours and forty-five minutes of densely layered text, movement, lighting, and music, performed on Maiko Matsushima's much-lauded set.

…and then there was you. Night after night, hundreds of you joined us at the show, and night after night, you joined the boisterous party of TWELFTH NIGHT, whooping, hollering, and sighing along with our cast of lovers, drunkards and fools. You came up to us in the lobby and said that this was the best TWELFTH NIGHT you'd ever seen, or the best Shakespeare you'd ever seen, or that it was the most fun you'd had in the theatre in years.

And for that, we say thank you.

As you can probably imagine, an enormous production like this, with 17 performers on stage (and more than 17 people working behind the scenes) took tremendous resources - time, creative energy, sweat, patience, and (coming around to the point) money.

We hope you will consider supporting our work with a gift by donating here.

We're so proud to announce a few tidbits of pretty-wonderful news for Pig Iron's future:

Thanks to the Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, a program of the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, we've received a $150,000 Catalyst grant to fund the launch of the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training, a new two-year program in physical and ensemble-created theatre based in Philadelphia.  More updates are coming on this huge moment in Pig Iron's always-interesting evolution, but suffice to say that we're extremely pleased.  A list of grant recipients is here.

We've also received a grant from the Independence Foundation New Works Initiative to support developmental work on three (!) new lines of inquiry: our upcoming dark fairytale Cankerblossom; a collaboration with playwright Toshiki Okada (the author of Enjoy, which Pig Iron co-founder Dan Rothenberg directed in its English-language premiere this spring); and an exploration of the world of Douglas Sirk's '50s and '60s melodramas.  We're also so pleased that New Paradise, Philadelphia Live Arts/Philly Fringe Festivals, and People's Light all received grants; congrats to them all.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: tickets are ON SALE to the aforementioned Cankerblossom.  You can buy them here.  Some fun Cankerblossom facts: 1) Pig Iron regulars Alex Torra and Hinako Arao are joined in this one by human Swiss Army knife Beth Nixon and David Sweeny (maybe you know him better as Johnny); 2) Christ Church Neighborhood House has air conditioning and an elevator now, so compared to past Pig Iron shows, we're basically living in the lap of luxury; and 3) we're developing this work in part with La Jolla Playhouse, who've been great to us throughout this project.

We couldn't be more pleased to send along the news that Mimi Lien's gargantuan evacuation staircase installation for Pig Iron's Love Unpunished has been selected to be featured in the US platform at the Prague Quadrennial.  The Quadrennial is the principal international exhibition of scenic design, and inclusion is a major honor; we're so proud of Mimi, and are patting ourselves on the back a little for working with such cool designers.

For those of you who missed Love Unpunished in 2006, a little about the show: co-led by Pig Iron co-founder Dan Rothenberg and David Brick, the Co-Artistic Director of Headlong Dance Theater, Love Unpunished was a meditative dance-theatre investigation of mourning and mortality, set on the evacuation staircase of the World Trade Center on September 11.  Mimi's design was the largest set build that we'd undertaken up to that point, highlighted by a spare, monumental two-story staircase installed into our performance space in the old Cinemagic movie theatre in University City.

Mimi has gone on to become an Associate Artist with Pig Iron, and designed the mammoth 120-foot wide set for last September's Welcome to Yuba City and is working with us again on our upcoming Cankerblossom.  In Philadelphia, she's also worked extensively with the Wilma Theater, where she won a Barrymore for her work on Outrage in 2006.

This is the second consecutive time a Pig Iron set design has been featured in the Prague Quadrennial; the site-specific performance bazaar that Anna Kiraly created for 2005's Pay Up was spotlighted in 2007.