Pig Iron's "Pay Up' at the FringeArts Festival (2nd review)

"This is really quite good," said the man behind the table as he studied the paper holding the Haiku I'd just written on an actor's orders. "I tell you what. I'm going to give you four… no, make that five dollars for it."

He counted out the bills and handed them to me. Then he fed my poem to the paper shredder beside him.

So began my experience at this year's FringeArts re-mount of Pig Iron's Pay Up, which premiered in Philadelphia at the 2005 Fringe. As Carol Rocamora notes in her BSR review, audience members should be prepared for the cast to get bossy.

If you enjoy paying to participate in the breakdown of the traditional audience/performer contract, Pay Up will delight you with its sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking depictions of how money informs and transforms our identities, our relationships, our families, our science and our art.

Slightly sinister

In the absence of a stage and a house, the audience roams Anna Kiraly's giant white set on the third floor of the Asian Arts Initiative on Vine Street. Giant cubbies and curtains delineate different mimed performances that audience members listen to via headphones. In roughly an hour, you're given six chances to choose among eight short scenes, each of which has an admission price.

The actors in this sprawling cast affect a detached, slightly sinister mien as they herd the audience into the space after donning sweaty, ankle-itching white plastic booties. A woman asked if I'd like a map, or if I'd like to navigate the show on my own. Her slightly impatient tone implied that the consequences of either choice might disappoint both of us, but that she didn't care too much one way or the other.

Before the recession

When I first saw Pay Up eight years ago, I had just declared my theater major as a college junior. It was the first time I'd been to the Fringe, and the show's emotional and physical experience stuck with me like nothing else I've seen since. I was curious to see if director Dan Rothenberg would change the performance to echo the Great Recession that hit the year after I graduated college, or if Pig Iron expected us to pay up again for a show we'd seen before.

While some segments of the show received small updates, the answer was clearly the latter.

"We wanted to revisit the piece in the changed economic landscape of America," Rothenberg explains in the program. "We were surprised to find that most of the material we made in 2005 (and in our 2008 remount) is still relevant."

Job market, then and now

In other words, here's one more marching order for Pig Iron's audience: If you want to see something new for the price of a Pay Up ticket, find it yourself in your own perception of the show. (Tickets are $25, and there's no student discount.)

"The weird thing is how much things haven't changed since 2005," Rothenberg writes, "or how much effort has gone into maintaining the illusion that nothing has changed."

But people who graduated from college since the Pay Up premiere would probably disagree. In 2006, I landed a good job before graduation day (as a theater major, mind you), and in the following year or two, almost everyone who got my résumé called me in for an interview.

"'There's no refund!'

But when I lost my full-time job late in 2010, job interviews were so few and far between that I turned to freelancing to survive. Millions of my peers have made the same terrifying choice, all while struggling with unprecedented student loans, heart-stopping healthcare bills and the rise of the "unpaid internship."

I would have loved to see Pig Iron explore these issues of debt, labor and the cost and value of education in 2013, instead of resurrecting much of the show verbatim, especially since some of the cast members are fresh from the company's own school. Or maybe Pig Iron did explore these issues, and I just happened to pay up for the wrong vignettes.

"Can I have my money back?" the cast intones in a mass "dance break."

"No you can't, no you can't," they sing. "There's no fucking refund!"

In any case, the answer to my own financial woes was also the last line of my Pay Up Haiku:

Fringe Fest surprises.
House manager sends me up.
Write for money? Sure.♦


To read another review by Carol Rocamora, click here.