Work-in-progress Running the gamut with Pig Iron BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Pig Iron Theatre Company is so renowned that they’ve made several successful tours of Europe before finally getting around to New England. The Philadelphia-based ensemble will be at Perishable Theatre for a two-week residency March 22 through April 3.

They’ll be performing two of the 17 plays they’ve created in their decade of existence. Starting things off March 22 to 26 will be Gentlemen Volunteers, a melodrama set on World War I battlefields. From March 30 to April 3, they will perform James Joyce Is Dead and So Is Paris: The Lucia Joyce Cabaret, in which a Hedwig-style rock band is composed of patients in a mental institution.

From melodrama to rock cabaret? What kind of a theater company is this, anyway?

"All of our work tries to address some kind of lack," said director and Pig Iron co-founder Dan Rothenberg. "It can be something really simple, like a kind of awkwardness that you don’t see on stage enough, or a kind of precision that you don’t see on stage enough. Precision in the sense of the choreography of breath or of gaze, something like that."

The company was founded 10 years ago by Rothenberg, Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel, and Dito Van Reigersberg, whose seniority among the 10 members earns them each the rank of artistic director. Rothenberg doesn’t act, as they do, but he directs most of the works.

Their process for developing scripts has the best of both the world of improvisation and of formal playwriting.

"When they come to the first day of rehearsal, they have no script," Rothenberg said. "We collaborate with the authors. And sometimes the authors, after watching improvs for a couple of days or a couple of weeks, will write a script that’s inspired by what was happening. Sometimes they write a script that is a shaped version of improvisations."

When plays are created so organically, with characters emerging through the psyches of the actors who will portray them, the results are never formulaic.

"The two pieces at Perishable are very different attempts to address a lack," said Rothenberg. "One is a piece with no props, but with very outsized, stylized characters, recalling the kind of characters that were in the movies in the ’30s. In the other piece, the characterizations are drawn from our research of people who are being treated for mental illness."

Written by Suli Holun, Gentlemen Volunteers technically is a melodrama, because of its plot line of peril and high emotions. It was described in the London Guardian as having "the all-consuming sense of being drunk with love on a cliff-edge." The model for examining the twin idealisms of war and romance is Ernest Hemingway, who glorified both in his writing. The novelist volunteered as an ambulance driver in war-torn France and wooed a nurse, as he fictionally described in The Sun Also Rises, and as do the two main characters in the play.

Pig Iron considers Gentlemen Volunteers, an early creation, to be a signature work, since the play blazes away in the full spectrum of their performance style. There is only accordion and clarinet, rather than the rock band of the second piece at Perishable, but the ensemble has other ways to involve us. The actors will include us in the performance space, for example, with the theater’s bleacher-stepped rows replaced with benches, the seating moved around the floor as the story progresses.

The second play, created five years after Gentlemen Volunteers, is based on the fact that James Joyce had a daughter. Lucia Joyce, a poet and dancer in her own right, spent most of her adult life locked in an insane asylum, as they were called then. Her lovers included playwright Samuel Beckett and artist Alexander Calder, but the Pig Iron play touches upon a more basic attachment — to her celebrated father.

Writer Toni Morrison has described James Joyce Is Dead as "dark, funny, moving, poignant . . . ." It was written by company member Deborah Stein, a poet and product of the MFA playwriting program at Brown. The character Lucia, played by Cassandra Friend, is a schizophrenic leading a band of patient-musicians. As her Thorazine stupor takes hold and eventually wears off, her singing style and song choice evolves from chanteuse-languorous to punk-ferocious. Watching a video of a performance, I admired how well two distinct moods and acting styles were merged. When Lucia’s father eventually shows up, late but courteous, Lucia’s emotional armor sloughs off like a second skin as she speaks with him. Suddenly we’re not in the stylized world of punk rock, we’re jolted into a realistic performance, watching a poignant father-daughter confrontation.

"All of the pieces are always under more development," Rothenberg said. "We do tinker. We do rehearse. Even after a piece has been in the repertory for two or three years, we’re still rehearsing and working on it."

How appropriate for a troupe from Pennsylvania called the Pig Iron Theatre Company. Pig iron is, after all, raw metal cast in pieces for further refinement.

Gentlemen Volunteers will be presented March 22 through 24 at 7 p.m and on March 25 and 26 at 8 p.m. James Joyce Is Dead will be presented March 30 and 31 at 7 p.m., on April 1 at 8 p.m., on April 2 at 7 and 10 p.m., and on April 3 at 3 p.m. at Perishable Theatre, 95 Empire Street, Providence. Tickets are $20 ($15 for students and seniors). Call (401) 621-6123 (www.arttixri.com).