Dito van Reigersberg, an actor, drag artist and co-founder of Pig Iron Theater Company, an acclaimed experimental troupe known for its surreal, sometimes carnivalesque productions, died on June 1 in Philadelphia. He was 53.
His husband, Matthew Neenan, confirmed the death, in hospice care at a hospital, from graft-versus-host disease (a complication of his bone-marrow transplant) and pneumonia. Mr. van Reigersberg was diagnosed with leukemia in 2022. He lived in Philadelphia and New York.
Antic yet elegant, Mr. van Reigersberg was closely associated with two important strands of 21st-century performance: devised physical theater — in which an ensemble works together to create a script through improvisation — and a playful, let-the-chest-hair-show take on drag.
Unveiled in 2005, Mr. van Reigersberg’s rock-cabaret drag persona, Martha Graham Cracker, gave energetic, emotionally frank performances that encompassed torch standards, pop, heavy-metal and show tunes. Often billed as “the world’s tallest and hairiest drag queen,” she gave her last show in Philadelphia in December.
Mr. van Reigersberg’s style of gender playfulness deliberately disrupted the cross-dressing illusion. Performing as Martha, he would, for example, wear a wig and eyelashes, but also flaunt his stubble, a drag-yet-not sensibility shared by artists like Taylor Mac and Cole Escola.
In his more than 30 years of work with Pig Iron — and, crucially, the school that the company established in 2011 — Mr. van Reigersberg helped popularize a process derived from clowning improvisations, in which hybrid theater works, full of movement and song, are developed during rehearsals, rather than before. The process has become a core part of much of American experimental work.
He formed Pig Iron in 1995, a year after graduating from Swarthmore College, with several former classmates, including the actor-deviser Quinn Bauriedel, who had been his freshman-year roommate, and the director Dan Rothenberg. Even as the group expanded, Mr. van Reigersberg — 6-foot-2, with a linebacker’s shoulders, a high forehead and the mournful eyes of a Byzantine icon — remained the most identifiable member.
According to Mr. Bauriedel, candor was both the root of Mr. van Reigersberg’s artistry and the lesson he taught his students: “The clown is very much like, ‘I’m going to show you all my warts and defects, and that’s my superpower — to not try to hide those things.’”
Fernando Steven van Reigersberg was born on Nov. 11, 1972, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in McLean, Va., the younger of two children of Fernando — Dito is short for Fernandito, or “little Fernando” — and Stephanie (Ross) van Reigersberg. His parents both worked as diplomatic interpreters, his father at the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization and his mother at the State Department.
As a child, he was reserved — performing only in his room, in secret. When he was a freshman at Langley High School, he planned to audition for “Animal Farm,” but was overwhelmed by shyness and took the bus home. He then “spoke to himself sternly,” his mother recalled in an interview, “and walked all the way back to the high school to try out.”
As a sophomore, he danced a solo as Tulsa in “Gypsy” — “this little shy kid!” his mother said — and in his junior year played Romeo in “Romeo and Juliet.”
At Swarthmore, Mr. van Reigersberg was exposed to experimental theater as well as European clowning traditions. He and Mr. Rothenberg met while doing a production of Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi,” a proto-Surrealist, obscenity-filled 1896 farce, which contained the seeds of what would become the Dadaist avant-garde. They and Mr. Bauriedel worked together on a site-specific production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” in which Mr. van Reigersberg played a dancerly Cyrano.
The roots of Martha Graham Cracker — at least her name — go back to Mr. van Reigersberg’s training, in his early 20s, with members of the Martha Graham Dance Company at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. Mr. van Reigersberg incorporated Graham’s physically rigorous compression-and-release technique into the Pig Iron method, which was also deeply informed by the French mime tradition of Jacques Lecoq.
In the early years of Pig Iron, Mr. van Reigersberg developed a solo, “Poet in New York” (1997), about Federico García Lorca, which he performed in both English and Spanish. The company took several shows to the Edinburgh Fringe, including “Gentlemen Volunteers” (1998) and the dream-logic movement piece “Shut Eye” (2001), which they devised with one of their heroes, the experimental theater titan Joseph Chaikin, as he was suffering from aphasia.
Mr. van Reigersberg’s talent for blending zaniness with romantic yearning was often a grounding element in Pig Iron’s intellectually hyperactive work. Mr. van Reigersberg “exudes an air of nervy masochism,” the critic Liesl Schillinger wrote in The New York Times in 2004 of his performance in the company’s fun-house take on Witold Gombrowicz, “Hell Meets Henry Halfway.”
Mr. van Reigersberg was an Edwardian nightmare in white long-johns and a waxed mustache in Pig Iron’s “Chekhov Lizardbrain” (2008); a beautifully drunk-in-love Orsino in the company’s 2011 version of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night, or What You Will”; and a brokenhearted author who disappoints his younger self in “Zero Cost House” (2012).
The director Sam Pinkleton, a longtime friend and collaborator, worked with him on the gonzo outer-space melodrama “I Promised Myself to Live Faster” (2015), Pig Iron’s tribute to Charles Ludlam. The show melded the Pig Iron method with Mr. van Reigersberg’s interest in queer maximalism: He played a galactic space emperor who must be defeated so that the Holy Gay Flame can return to Earth.
Mr. Pinkleton marveled at the sense of communion between Mr. van Reigersberg and his audience, particularly when he was in drag. “The presentation of Martha didn’t tell any lies,” Mr. Pinkleton said in an interview. “Dito didn’t go away when Martha was in the room.”
In addition to his husband, a choreographer and dancer, Mr. van Reigersberg is survived by his mother and his sister, Alexia van Reigersberg Bastiaansen.
After several years of struggling with cancer — first lymphoma, then leukemia — a bone-marrow transplant in 2023 enabled a torrent of energetic output. “Dito came back with ferocity,” Mr. Pinkleton said. Last year, Mr. van Reigersberg remounted a 2024 avant-cabaret show, “Poor Judge,” which he had conceived around the songs of Aimee Mann. Mr. van Reigersberg intended to perform in it again but had to withdraw when his health began to fail. (Pax Ressler performed the part instead.)
Also last year, he was part of a revival of Heather Christian’s “Oratorio for Living Things,” an ecstatic communal hymn, at the Signature Theater in New York. The performers glided around a deep blue, aquarium-like room, singing and making deliberate eye contact with the audience.
“It was about sort of everything, you know?” Mr. Bauriedel said. “Breath and life and moments and time and eternity and preciousness and humanity.”
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